10k views wow! shoutout to skittybitty to helping this reach people. this ramble is pretty old but channel isn’t quite dead, i’m finally on break from college and far into writing something more juicy where i’m deeppp in my game design shit, sub if you want to see it when it drops 😏
Hey, cudos to your great narration. I’m a long time Zelda fan and have seen a bunch of videos on totk, but you’re strangely eloquent, with a few fucks here and there. Keep it up, look foward to more essays!
One of the most aggravating things about Totk's narrative is how irrelevant Calamity Ganon was to the overall world-building. We literally fight a 1,000-foot tall Malice Boar smack in the middle of Hyrule Field in the last game and no-one seems to have noticed. Even the side-quest where we teach the school kids about the Great Calamity is specifically only about the 10,000 years-ago Calamity, not the more recent iteration. It's as if there's been some great conspiracy in Hyrule to erase all mentions of the literal apocalypse from the historical record. There's a scene in one of the memories where Zelda tells Rauru she believes Ganondorf has ulterior motives, and that even his name makes her feel uneasy, though she's not sure why. Yes, apparently Zelda is unable to draw any parallels between the names GANONdorf and GANON. Then in a later memory she tells Rauru about how Link once saved Hyrule from "a great evil", specifically not mentioning Calamity Ganon by name. It's just...how do you make the writing this bad? Were they doing it on purpose, because it sure feels like it.
@@ProjectionProjects2.7182 It kind of feels like Totk is ASHAMED to be a Botw sequel. It's constantly skirting around every opportunity to bring up and reference events from the previous game, it REALLY doesn't want the two stories to be connected. And in the few extremely rare instances it DOES bring up Botw, it's always an extremely brief mention in a single line of dialogue that ultimately means nothing, goes nowhere, and is immediately discarded and forgotten about. I have never seen any other sequel do this before, it's so bizarre.
"Its almost as if there's some great conspiracy in Hyrule to erase the memory of any apocalypse ever being mentioned " Just that quick, you accidentally came up with a plot that wouldve been 100x more interesting than what we got.
@@natesamadhi33 I'm not quite sure how this "great conspiracy" plot would work, given that Zelda herself is supposed to be in charge of Hyrule. But the story we actually got didn't make any sense either, so...
The sequel I had in mind: - Rebuild Hyrule! - Cleanse Hyrule of Calamity Ganon’s influence, like the Malice! - Have the Yiga Clan be the main antagonists! - NPCs remember you from BotW!
@@Matt-eh2dyyiga being the main baddies wouldn't be great but a sequel that actually deals with the themes and events of the first game? Yeah i would actually enjoy that
@@Windwaker_is_the_goat Not even the last one. Several locations treat you like you're brand new despite being legacy locations, the worst being Hateno Village -- because the game implies that Link *lived there* with Zelda, but everybody including *Bolson,* the *guy who made the house,* acts like they've never seen you before.
Majora’s mask’s is an actual sequel. Tears Of the Kingdom is a “Master Quest” full of plot holes. They should have stuck with the story of BOTW, not retcon a lot of it to make goat gods fit. I loved the new Sheikah lore.
So was Phantom Hourglass, and even Spirit Tracks which takes place long after the events of WW and PH but still manages to acknowledge the events of those games while still setting up a brand new world for a brand new Link to explore. You could even take it all the way back to Zelda 2, which is presented as a direct sequel to the original game. Nintendo HAS experience making Zelda sequels in a way that feels satisfying, I liked the DS games, Zelda 2 is one of the most underrated games in the franchise, and Majora’s Mask is not only my favorite game of all time, but one of my favorite pieces of media EVER. That was honestly the main reason I was so excited for TotK, because it looked like it was going to be a lot darker in the way that MM took a much darker direction than OoT, but it was just kinda… meh
@@data_expunged97the only way I can beat TOTK, is to play it as a sequel to actually “Spirit Tracks” It’s the only way I can get all the lore to fit in canon. That’s why theirs a new Hyrule, and a new Ganon. Link wearing a different colour instead of Green. That’s why there’s vehicle and technology in the ancient past.
@@GoronMerchant yeah, I would have loved a sequel that was similar to the direction Spirit Tracks took, with a new generation in a Hyrule that’s been rebuilt. It would have been so much easier to explain things like the disappearance of the Sheikah tech, they could have said that the people of Hyrule destroyed it since it played such a significant role in the initial calamity, which isn’t a perfect explanation but it’s still miles ahead of “it just fucked off overnight”
@@data_expunged97 that is the canon reason with the Sheikah tech that why you can’t see them when Hyrule floats into the sky But they still use it in some case, so it ends up being one big plot hole. I really don’t like that they used time travel, and made Zonai goat people in this game. I rather them just use Sheika Physics and Tech/Magic lore in the sequel, like it was leading in the ending of BOTW. The reason I mention Spirit tracks, these two games are the sequel to Wind Waker Links family tree. That is why things are so different, yet similar. That’s reason we can have a new imprisoning War. Both games are set in the future, even Raru’s Era. Thats the only way I can have fun with this game. To play it like a successor to SP. I would have loved a good sequel to BOTW, one that’s not just copy/paste and Goat powers. We did not get that. We got a okay/mid one after 6 years.
I will defend botw’s story until I die. I think the flashback heavy narrative was the whole point. There’s a bittersweet melancholy feeling when you see these cutscenes. The more you see and the more you end up connecting with the characters through these cutscenes the more it ends up feeling even more like a tragedy. It's a unique way if storytelling that I think really worked and added to the atmosphere of the game
@@idkidkidk170 Yeah i think the cutscene story delivery could not have worked for any game but BOTW. the constant conversations-about-what-just-happened-or-will-happen instead of showing-what-actually-happened thing makes me enjoy them less, but still. Worked way better for BOTW than TOTK as a delivery method.
I agree BOTW story felt like it made more sense for you to find these story moments out in the wild because it was Link going back to places to recognizes to rebuild his memories. It made sense within the context of the game. TOTK reuses the system from BOTW for the glyphs but it feels so cynical in comparison because it lacked that context and felt arbitrary.
I remember specifically having an "oh...." moment when I tracked down one of the flashbacks where the gang was at the fountain doing their things (and this was after I had found a bunch of the others beforehand). Knowing what would happen and seeing them all together and lively had this profound effect when the flashback faded to my current Link, wearing a mishmash of found armor, standing in fountain ruins during the sunset, all alone and in utter silence with nothing but wind in the background. Not a soul for miles except for him. The game always loads back in this way after the flashbacks, but the juxtaposition of the flashbacks tone against the silence of the present and the time of day made the moment feel bitter and lonesome, almost like Link was aware of exactly what he lost and how badly he failed. It was a handful of somber moments like that that made me feel the BOTW story was always good, and I still think its better delivered than TOTK
In BOTW, Links had a relationship/history with the Sages. In TOTK, this feels forced. How did the Champions remember Link, but Hateno villagers did not?
Lovely video! Hatano was the first place I went too right after I got the paraglider and when I realized that nobody really knew Link, I just felt so disappointed. It truly feels like Totk is embarrassed to be a sequel.
Indeed, instead they opted for a remake (shrines, memories-based story, identical dungeons (five switches), koroks…). Quite a let down. Would have been nice with a story in the present with Link initially caught in the Depths. Imagine Kooga meeting Ganonfdorf…
that would solve so many problems (people not remembering link or the calamity, everything sheikah vanishing off the face of the earth, the map being exactly the same with no incentive to explore it)
making everyone forget Link was a huge mistake. I also agree that the champions were not supposed to be ghosts at first. Probably their teleporting and collision was just too hard to make realistic.
I really don’t understand why they made link be forgotten to some NPCs. Like is it really going to confuse new players that an NPC knows your name?????? How would that make anyone confused?? Countless games start in a town, and you talk to npcs and everyone calls you by your name and as if there’s history there. They’re acting like it was such a difficult realistic concept,, when it’s completely realistic to begin with
"Zelda sounds like she's on the verge of crying or passing out" that's a hilarious way to describe that insanely irritating voice, everytime she talks I mute the game
10:14 see but thats the thing! link was never just an empty husk for the player to inhibit and control, he was always character with his own personality that was reflected in cutscenes, animations, and the game play. botw back tracked this and totk outright denies link's character :(
I would have liked to see more little settlements and mini villages starting up where old ruins had been in BOTW. When I first saw the Hudson building material spots, I had thought there would be a quest to help build a small village with all Link's new powers... Edit: I completely forgot about repairing Lurelin bc it was that insignificant...
@@ralcogaming7674 Ya I know, that's why I completely forgot about the experience. I was simply rebuilding what had already been there. I wish the game had something new to create aside from the weird custom house.
BRUVVVVVV YESSS!!!!!! This is exactly what I said. I thought the Hudson quest was a buildup (no pun intended) to have mini villiages or to have small houses around the map that NPCs can move into. But gurlllllll they ain’t do nothing with it!!!!!!! Ahh it’s madness. Especially with castle town. The materials are right there!!! The foundations are built and right there !!!
I'm exactly in the same boat as you, I wanted to love it so bad. I watched a no-spoiler review of the game from a guy who got it early about 5 days before release, he said it destroys Breath of the Wild in every single way and goes beyond, and that gave me a lot of hope. But when I played it I couldn't shake the feeling that something was wrong, from the lack of explanation of the Sheikah tech to no one recognizing you in Hateno... All my Nintendo-fan friends called me crazy, later they also defended the 4 times same cutscene thing and I realized they probably would defend anything because it's Zelda. I'm glad to finally see videos addressing what I've been feeling since day one.
I'm sorry you had to go through that. I got skewered for saying TotK was lame and BotW was a bit overhyped. You're not crazy, nothing is perfect and criticism is important because it helps us to improve. Unfortunately, with responses from Aonuma and his thoughts about the game's success I'm in fear for the Zelda franchise
I wrote this video at the peak of TOTK hype when barely anyone seemed to be pointing out the glaring issues. The shower of praise you described was a huge part of why I made the vid. Hype blindness is real
I have a Zelda tattoo fam and I’ll be the first to tell you this game is ass lmao I never even finished it. I’m currently on ganondorf and I just got bored and haven’t picked the game up since lmao
@@bardicindecision And you have the most impressionable audience: people too young to play the older games with lore and story, then the people today too young to play BOTW to see what TOTK really is. And I think Nintendo, who caters to kids, knows this. They made their billions, got lazy, and no longer care about story and lore. Just flashy action and cool scenes. And unsurprisingly, kids eat it up. Us old folks are wondering what happened instead.
I've never played the Switch zelda games, but from most of the takes ive seen on the game it seems like the developers were too scared of adding anything new for fear of BOTW fans not liking the new game, which ironically caused BOTW fans to not like the game, its super interesting to me
@@Simply_NoroYT Yup sounds about right. Classic case of fear from companies & disconnect with their audiencies leading to a lack of risktaking and their fears coming true
@@bardicindecision "Classic case"? You got any more examples? Can't think of many examples off the top of my head but the Tomb Raider series might fit?
@@Takejiro24The mob vote for Minecraft comes to mind. Microsoft/mojang is afraid of adding too much to Minecraft which made lots of Minecraft fans angry
@@Takejiro24 the behavior of AAA companies all over the place, making very “safe” decisions artistically which end up being so bland they lose audience interest and a bajillion dollars. Suicide Squad, that new hero shooter Concord everyone’s dunking on, etc etc
The story is the most egregious part of this game. In BotW it makes sense for the story to be told through fragmented memories; Link has amnesia and has to piece together his past, and since everything happened so long ago, it doesn't have an immediate effect on the present. If the player decides to prioritize exploration over playing the story, it makes sense for Link to do this as he doesn't remember his past and doesn't have an emotional connection with this world and these characters. Once the player discovers the memories, they may become compelled to save Zelda, as they now understand Link's conncection to these characters. With TotK there is no reason for the story to be told in this way. There is an active narrative in the present, characters we interact with that contribute to the story. I'm certain the only reason they had Zelda go back in time was so they could repeat this narrative structure; this time, it is even messier in execution, and does not fit thematically like BotW's story did. Also, the dead champions in BotW had more depth than the sages in the present, and especially more than the sages of the past. Mipha's unrequited love, Revali's jealousy of Link, Urbosa becoming a mother figure to Zelda after the death of her mother... These characters are far more interesting than the sages. The sages have little to no depth; the game tries to introduce "character arcs" for some of the sages, but you won't remember them anyway because they're introduced and resolved through dialogue, rather than shown through cutscenes like with the champions. The dialogue after Tulin fights a monster before partnering up with Link and when Sidon reflects on Mipha are examples of this, but calling them character arcs is generous, as there's almost no depth to these interactions. To add insult to injury, the characters introduced in the past have no depth at all. And scenes where they interact with Ganondorf make them seem incompetent, making it hard for me to like these characters in any way. And don't get me started on the identical, repeated cutscenes... Nintendo was incredibly lazy handling the story in a game that needed a more present narrative.
@@Somarimanga Oh yeah, for sure. I didn't mention Daruk but he's also way more interesting than TotK's characters. I don't think he has as much depth as the others, but he does have a distinct personality, which the new characters introduced in TotK don't; Raaru and Sonia are pretty much blank slates. Daruk is protective of the other champions, enjoys joking around, and has his quirks that make him interesting (being scared of dogs).
One of the major drawbacks is not being able to rebuild Hyrule. It was sad because I thought doing all the Bolson minichallenges around the map would unlock the ability to rebuild Hyrule Castle, or the mini challenges would make tiny houses be built around the map. The story also didn’t captivate me. Nothing significant was really added to the lore..and the creators didn’t really seem interested in the lore either. This game just didn’t feel right
I have no idea what went wrong in the Nintendo office between Botw and Totk. Something must've been horrifically wrong for this to be the final product.
Nothing went wrong, Aonuma cares way more about gameplay then narrative or anything else. They spent a shit load of time designing and perfecting the new mechanics, and then building a huge new playground with 3 levels to play with it in. That’s what the game really is and everything surrounding it is just the package it came in
@@jchud13Aonuma should have made a spin-off instead of making the worst Zelda ever, even worse than Skyward Sword and only surpassed by the CDI games and Four Swords.
@@jchud13Problem with that for me is for a third of the game, and that's being generous to the sky islands, the map wasn't designed with ultra hand in mind leading the gameplay system to feel incredibly shallow.
What went wrong was the unanimous praise botw received from players despite it being a very mid flawed game imo. I enjoyed botw for maybe 20-30 hours before my experience soured. After my first 2 divine beast I realized the game was extremely dumbed down compared to previous Zelda games before it. Aunouma was like “oh you all like this s*** huh!?” So players like doing boring soulless repetitive task spread across an enormous map ?🤔 F*** it triple the map size and give them more repetitive crap to do again and they’ll surely jizz their pants 👖 💦 🤦 “oh you like finding 900 korok seeds and being gifted golden S*** huh !? Well here’s more of that s*** “! 😂🤦
So, i'm new to zelda, i started with BotW. I played it the last time maybe a year ago, and at the time i didn't even know that the "sequel" was in development until i have beaten the game. I was hyped, as BotW was something for me. It was my favourite open world game ever. The amount of things you could do just blew my mind. So then they teased TotK more, we got all this new trailers, and it looked cool, but i had this weird feeling that it felt more like a DLC than a full blown sequel. But anyway, i waited. Then the game came out, and i couldn't play it, because my switch was stolen. So i said fuck it, downloaded an emulator and tried it. And it was fun... For the first couple of hours. Then i was shocked as i continued playing it. The sheikah technology? Yeah, let's just pretend it never existed. The guardians? Nah, fuck it, we'll leave you one at the hateno's research lab and that's it. There was so many fucking cool things that could be done with the guardians. Just imagine going to the underworld, and then you hear that terrifying sound from your past. At least as a secret boss or something. But no. The game treats BotW almost like it never existed. I found the shrine of ressurection, and was disappointed to find just some stupid cave with yiga enemies and one construct. And then yes, the Hateno village treats you like you've never been here before. After you save Lurelin the same shit happens. No one recognises you. The only dungeon i enjoyed was probably the pyramid, and the entire gerudo quest. But i fucking despised the Gorons quest, their entire village, the dungeon, i hated it. The game is fun sometimes. I plan on buying a new switch, thankfully i have BotW on my account, and than i'll try to 100% it. Than i will try TotK again, but the only thing i know for sure, is that i miss BotW. I didn't know who Ganon really was when i played BotW, so i enjoyed this villain. Then i knew it was Ganondorf, and hated it. Let's just face it, the Ganon even sounds better than Ganondorf, but most importantly, it looks better too. The prologue was great though. Update: Building stuff is just annoying in this game. The rotation is a nightmare, and how it sticks sometimes not like you want it to was so annoying.
the fact that the yiga couldve stolen a couple guardians and brought them to the depths like the idea is RIGHT there. i kinda get why they disappeared, maybe they were destroyed for safety concerns BUT STILL. the idea of seeing the guardian lights in the darkness with the music starting and the laser wouldve been so cool and terrifying
I played BoTW for an unholy amount of hours, especially during my Bachelor's Thesis. Then a guy in my student dorms lent to me ToK. He was rather disappointed by it. He told me that maybe this was because He wasn't such a huge BoTW fun, he admitted he liked it but nothing more. I played it for 10 hours and then dropped it, didn't even reach one of the main dungeons . At the start, especially the tutorial I had lots of fun, until I started nosing around the map and everything fell apart. I was curious about the old tech, the Shika one. I hadn't read the interview about it, so i was 100% sure it had been gutted and i would only find empty husks of the shrines and so long. Haetano, nobody remembers/knows you. The world felt static. Such a shame and waste of money in my opinion (If you enjoyed it good for you eh, it's not a slight, it's just an observation about the tag price) I get that they wanted tabula rasa or some such, but this is fucking preposterous and if you add that bloody interview, well..I guess that they had to make a game more than a sequel.
I feel like a lot of the people who spent 100s of hours in BotW were expecting TotK to fix the big issues of BotW. Nintendo did fix a lot of smaller issued and gave most of it a new coat of paint to make it look different, but under the surface TotK is virtually just the same game with the exact same big flaws as BotW, and it was truly disappointing to so many of us.
Great video, you bring up good points and illustrate very well why I was addicted to Tears of the Kingdom for two months and afterwards I haven't felt like playing it and have felt more in the mood to watch all the essays about it being disappointing instead. Also, I loved Breath of the Wild, but my biggest issue with it was that it didn't have any cats and that you couldn't pet the dogs and in Tears of the Kingdom none of those issues were solved and I know it's not important, but Nintendo should have understood how happy those things would have made people, like "game has cat and you can pet animals" is a net positive.
i think a good chunk of this games problems could have been solved by it being later than it was, because right now most of the world hasnt changed much since the calamity
very true. imagine if it took place when zelda had fully taken her place on the throne and the rebuilding of hyrule was in full swing…. way more interesting than a bunch of rinky dink towns
@@bardicindecision Yes! If they had all this time to build new Towers, Dismantle everything else from BOTW (Divine Beast, Shrines, Towers, Guardians etc), they should have made much more significant progress in Hyrule. They could have easily had the overworld be somewhat rebuilt, Hyrule Castle seeing vast improvements and the such, and then as the main quest as it was taking place below Hyrule Castle, the Depths could have been the "darkworld" of a Link to the Past or something similar. Forgo the sky islands and focus on the depths as the additional play world. I mean Gloom was coming out of the ground - kind of makes sense to have the baddies be underground for the most part with some on the surface as you traveled trying to gain necessary instructions from the NPCs and villages.
honestly my feelings for tears of the Kingdom can be summed up by its Kakariko Village. its got some new nooks and crannies to crawl into with not much worth finding, but its the same place now with a whole lotta sky garbage dumped on it and a deep gaping hole that leads to a Nyctophobic's nightmare. I think I said it elsewhere but TotK fails as both a standalone title and as a sequel simply because it doesn't have enough original material to stand on and not enough ties connecting it to its older brother and yet somehow still feels like DLC. the things I liked about it can't outweigh the things I don't. and this is coming from someone who found every single Shrine, Lightroot, Armor set, Sage Vow and Bubblefrog/cave. I was really hoping that Castle town was going to get a Tarry town treatment: gathering materials and people to rebuild it to its former glory, maybe a fun chain where you go around gathering the wandering Merchants to make a Market district so you don't have to hunt them down on the road when you need something or the homeless travelers to build a place to for them to call home safe from all the monsters, Lookout Landing is a hole in the ground and the novelty of it being an underground bunker and freaking out the guard by just ascending through the roof wore off pretty fast, I was hoping there would be some level of base upgrading where the Landing would expand out into Castletown as you solved more of the other races problems, they lend their skills to help build things: you helpled the Zora so the Fountain can now be fixed cus Puddles from the feesh-peeps is a hydro-engineer and knows what to do to get the fountain working again, Biggest of Bois from the Goron developed a technique to smack stones so they break to be perfectly square to rebuild the cobblestone streets and so on, what would have been real cool as well is rebuilding Lon Lon Ranch so you could catch and sell wild horses as a way to get rupees outside mining and selling gems or gathering a colossal amount of frozen meat. and yes I did do the Super cold Day Dupe I needed the money and Didn't want to go caving for shiny rocks.) Once I spent so long in the depths that when I returned to the surface my _Eyes hurt_ since they had _adjusted to looking at low light environments_ and it happened to be smack in the middle of the day when I went back to the top, I legit camped out on top of a mountain to watch the sun rise and help my eyes readjust to the normal brightness. I feel like if the dragon Tear cutscenes were given to you in order like you complete certain points a new drop glyph shows up somewhere like Zelda basically sending Link messages in bottles through time up until you realize _how_ she's doing it, because let me just say that I found out what Zelda did before the reveal that you were chasing a puppet and it just absolutely killed some of the reveals for me, even though I found the glyphs in order by taking photos from the temple walls from left to right. they also never really do anything about Link's Gloom infection, even when you get all the light balls there's no "you are fully purged from gloom", its just some creepy Zonai outfit. I kind of wanted a trial of the Champion 2.0 dungeon where you basically go in to a secret dungeon Temple to fully expunge the gloom and it makes some kind of Gloom based shadow-Link as a boss, Like how they made the Temple of time dungeon from Twilight princess. heck they could have used Sonia as the ghost guide. the other Ideal idea is just yeet both Zelda and Link to the past and have the game take place there, a similar enough Hyrule but different enough that its not breath of the wild copy pasted with a bunch of crap dropped on it and a bunch of random holes stabbed in it. the two of them trying to find out how they got to the past, why Sh!t was getting f*cked up in their present, who that dry hunk of meat they found was, Purging Link of his gloom infection and restoring the Master Sword. ending the game with the classic Link Vs Ganon fight starting with Rauru's sacrifice, Link and Zelda going into stasis together to complete the fight in the present from the moment their past selves falling into the past, it would give Ganon a better reason to Go F*ck it and eat his stone.
Great video! I'll never get sick of TOTK reviews, because man... the game left me feeling so hollow. I was so hyped for it and it just felt like Breath Of The Wild Remixed. I haven't finished the game, and I dunno if I want to go back and finish it. It feels like a microwaved version of BOTW. There are some spots that are hot and tasty, but most of it has been melted into mush.
Thank goodness for the algorithm; this was lovely and so spot on. I’m an older Zelda fan (elder millennial) and wholeheartedly embraced BOTW’s new approach, so I wondered if my issues were due to stubbornness or what. But this was very validating. I only gave TOTK about 10-15 hours of my time and just couldn’t get invested. I’m glad to see that saving my time was the best move because yikes. Finding out that folks don’t even REMEMBER WHAT I DID under some silly notion it’s exclusionary to new players is almost insulting. At least majoras mask totally changed your environment and the game play loop. I loved this video so much. Subscribed!
a great video~ man, the point on narrative design, and them losing the plot... like, yes, I've been a long-time fan. I grew up on Wind Waker and Oracle of Ages, so I may be a little biased. but I just feel like they were so much better at telling a straightforward narrative before!! what happened??? even comparing something like TotK!Ganondorf to his counterpart in Wind Waker feels straight-up unfair. with less dialog and fewer appearances, WW!Ganon is INFINITELY more fascinating, as a ghost of a man who clings to his dreams of past conquests and "doing it all again, but for real". that character still makes me FEEL something
Never played tears of the kingdom cus my brother hogs our switch. But all of these new good “TOTK is disappointing” essays produced by first timers are making me re-examine my excuses for why I’m not swallowing my pride and making some video essays of my own.
Hey just wanted to let you know your video is awesome, please make more! Awesome flow, fun script, great editing. I'll give you the highest compliment there is: I ate dinner watching it. You got my sub!
My weird experience was that I did the whole master sword/knowing zelda is a dragon quest-and then after i still had to do the quest where I'm walking around investigating the fake zeldas all over the world without the ability to tell anyone that I know for a fact what happened to the real zelda so I know for a fact that this is a fake zelda-the non linearity just made the experience make no sense
Just finished watching this video, went to your channel and was completely confused as to how you have no other videos, and then saw how little views and subscribers you have and was even more confused just because of the absolute quality of this video as to how small your channel is! Honestly I enjoyed every part of it, you make some great points and your commentary sounds just like commentary from a creator with 10s of 1000s of subs with your clarity of speech and well-thought-of script You should really consider making some more content on UA-cam, and hopefully you get some more attention because you 100% deserve it!
I think you're the first person I've seen call out the missed opportunity to have Link help more with rebuilding Hyrule using the new abilities, even if only incidentally. That's a really cool idea that feels so underdeveloped.
I was just playing last night and noting the clear disconnect between level design and game mechanics. You have a clip where you make a hover bike in the fire temple... exactly! Why did the level designers go through all the trouble meticulously laying out railroad tracks/puzzles if the whole thing can be cheesed by flying? This is literally true of every new level (sky temple, Gerudo desert sandstorm, basically all of the sky islands... everything). In order to enjoy the game the level designers intended, you have to intentionally & knowingly handicap yourself: that's bad level/game design.
The most frustrating part for me is they did not connect the Breathe of the Wild lore to Tears of Kingdom lore! it's like they scrap most of the BOTW lore even though we know it's only few years apart till TOTK happened! The sheikh's history and lore are almost non-existent on TOTK, another frustrating is Zelda literally takes over the house that link bought on BOTW.
They really wanted to have their cake and eat it too. In botw, it is made clear from the start that the champions lost 100 years ago, so the memory cutscenes don't have to worry about advancing the plot. They just exist to show small moments between Link and Zelda/the champions. You can view the memories in pretty much any order and still come away understanding what happened. But with totk, they wanted to have a more complicated plot. But instead of coming up with some way to organically feed you that story, they just copied the same system as botw. So now you have a bunch of cutscenes that actually build off of each other, but you can still view them in any order. Which means that, if you want the best experience with the story, you have to go out of your way to avoid getting any cutscenes early even if its way more convenient to do them out of order (Why is the cutscene where Sonia dies all the way on the bottom right corner of the map, but the one immediately after that where Zelda is holding her dead body is on the upper left corner? ESPECIALLY WHEN THE GAME URGES YOU TO GO TO THE REGION IN THE TOP LEFT FIRST!). I find totk to be way more fun when i force myself to do things that aren't "optimal." But I shouldn't have to balance the game for myself just to make it fun.
The game urges you to go for the bottom right corner as well, there are many Lurelin NPCs asking for help about their pirates problem. The cutscene with "Zelda" attacking Sonia was the SECOND cutscene of the tears I have seen after the first one from Impa. I knew the whole story before I reached the other tears. I was hoping at first that it wasn't that big of adeal, maybe it will show some other significant events or just.. something interesting in general but half of the tears are just buildup to that moment! I was very disappointed
I feel like they could have fixed that by having the cutscenes in a set order, and whenever you find a new tear it gives you the next cutscene. At least you would always get them in order
i 100% had my issues with BOTW, but the world design and all the new shit was so cool and interesting that i kept coming back and i kept wanting to come back. with TOTK, like u said, its like a FUCKING UBISOFT game dude ! like i play and i get bored cause its all the same uninspired shit plastered everywhere. it feels like they took the masterful world design of BOTW, the literal handcrafted perfectly explorable world, the size, distance, and traversal of the map, shrines/landmarks that had accompanying lore to fit into and explain the world, and then with TOTK they literally took a shit on all of that and they.. remixed the world, instead of actually expanding on it, or showing its growth ? in doing so fucking up a bunch of lore and continuity for no actual reason or even worse no reason at all because they.. couldnt be bothered to even think of one i guess *cough* sheikah tech *cough*
I've developed a hobby watching Totk experiences/critique. This was really good. I grew up with Zelda 1, didn't give that much attention. Fell in love with Zelda 2, got hyped over Zelda 3 and wasn't disappointed. Then Oot came, and it was just too much pausing for me, too much dialog. Today i really miss the music and the mystery.
Great video! What really struck me with TotK was that I just wanted to get dungeons (and shrines) over with as fast as possible, whereas dungeons used to be a highlight for me. I didn't mind the Divine Beasts so much, but I was ready for something a bit more compelling with TotK. I also just keep wondering why the depths were so empty... My initial thoughts on what the game would be was that Hyrule would be shattered in all sorts of pieces revealing a new surface (the depths, I guess). You could minimize changes to Hyrule in that way, and the new shrines would be revealed in this new surface (again, the depths). Another idea was having the Surface of Hyrule choked by a miasma that was extremely dagerous and you could travel to the depth to trigger shrines connected to light roots that sprout a tree on the surface that clear the miasma (sorta like how areas of the depths are revealed). Stuff like the fairies could have fallen in the depths and as you cleared the miasma, you could work with Purah to reactivate old Sheika shrines. Denizens of Hyrule might be infected by the miasma, and you'd need to rescue them. Some chunks of Hyrule would have risen and be designed evacuation zones for everybody escaping the miasma. The changes to Hyrule in TotK seem so awkward to me, because the map was designed for BotW. The removal of all the Sheika technology seems so baffling. Why remove all of that stuff? It's extra work for nothing, and the "mysteriously disappeared" explanation is idiotic and frustrating. I don't get this game at all... They did everything almost exactly the same, and I kept wondering why. I had so many ideas before the game, and I kept having them as I played, but I kept getting confronted with sameness. At 300+, I tried my damndest to find new things. I really wanted to love this game too, but it's disappointing I wasted so much time on it searching for something I never found.
what's weird about all these type of videos is that I find myself agreeing with a decent amount of the video. And then I go back and play the game and completely love it.
Rare case of levelheadeness. There are plenty of games I love that have received scathing and completely valid critiques. It's okay to enjoy something despite its flaws.
When I first played at launch I felt so Bleh…I’ve done this before,. It was a big weight on my mind so after 20hrs of the game I was just scrolling UA-cam watching spoiler free reviews and so many were saying my thoughts were wrong so I was gaslit into thinking other wise. Then 6 months to a year later so many content creators I watched for Zelda content came out with opinions that I had a felt. Finally so weight lifted. Still haven’t beat it, 150hrs in and doing like 2hr sessions and have no care for spoilers. I will definitely go back to botw. Idk about tears
The thing you mentioned about making it friendly to new players is the fact that BOTW has a bunch of shit relating to the other games, like Zelda fans were constantly talking about it and you know what that made me, a person who started out with botw do?, want to play the other games so I can get hyped when I replay and see the Easter eggs too. I immediately bought Skyward Sword HD when I could bc the switch is the only console I have and I was VERY excited to play another Zelda title. (And I absolutely fell in love with SS) They had a real opportunity to have ppl want to buy botw if they had played totk bc huh this guy seems important, I wonder how that developed in game 1. But instead, ppl are instead saying to not play botw bc they are basically the same game but different. Botw felt extremely thought out, the different way ppl interact with you based on how you explored? Like how the Zora king and sidon respond to you different if you met sidon or if you found a way there without doing that? There are countless other examples that I can't think of. The lack of calamity stuff is the most egregious thing to me, when I had to teach those kids about the calamity 10k yrs ago I was extremely confused. Why would the kids who was raised in calamity's time not know about the calamity? Thier PARENTS grew up during the same time, and even grandparents. Like a century went by and everyone greaved as if it was yesterday, 6yrs go by and all of a sudden know one know what calamity Ganon is? What malice is? The Zora especially pissed me off, 100 years to them is like 2 yrs, they should still be deep in thier mourning of Mipha. I get they need to actually need to start the moving on process but like, it feels like the completely forgot. Teba, Revali's number one mega fan, didn't mention his son can do what his hero did but sideways??? Wasn't going crazy with pride that omg my son is like one of our greatest warriors. He doesn't even mention him by name when giving him that bow. (Idk rito lore but they made it seem pretty rare for a rito to be able to control the wind like that, like no other Rito seems to be able to do that. I think there should be alot more hype around that) Why is there a lack of reaction from the gerudo about Ganondorf? Or the shiekah? 16:22 THIS I actually had more fun playing like I was in botw bc I just couldn't be bothered to make stuff with ultrahand. It's to precision based, to time consuming, and for what? A cool thing that disappears before I can have to really fun. Or a thing that makes fighting more chaotic? Things got chaotic with 2 sticks and a bomb rune, adding a glue stick mech to the mix isn't really doing anything but making things overwhelming. I can kill everything before my cool thing even gets a good rhythm of attack. 21:49 THIS. Let me explain my relationship with how I thought Zelda was gonna be in this game. to start it off, Nintendo released SSHD. My silly little brain thought they were trying to tell us something about TOTK , so I IMMEDIATELY got it bc I had never played it before and I was excited to see how it would parallel with the newsr game. Fast forward to actually playing TOTK I'm sitting here thinking that we are about to get a reverse SS. Follow Zelda through the past this time,or have link go to the past and have Zelda steadily build up hyrule in the future as she tries to research and find link. Have paya follow her around since impa is old or something. Zelda is all about research she should be in kakariko studying the zonai. she should be trying to dig into the past to figure out what a secret stone is,or who Ganondorf actually is. Link can fuck around in the sky with the zonai. Just like how link has to help Zelda in the present and then help her in the past. Zelda turns into a dragon and it reminds me of how hylia/zelda put herself to sleep to help link in the future. And then in the end of the game they reverse her decision, like nit herself the ghosts of her psudeo goat parents. It felt like a much less thought out SS plot I'm in the same boat, I wanted to LOVE this game but it left me feeling so much and so little
3:32 I don't agree with the notion that the verticality ruins exploration. The issue does definitely lay with the fact that it's the same map, so you've already seen most of the big stuff like you said. Not enough is changed on the ground level for me to try and actually enjoy exploring because I've already seen it all with Botw.
Thank you so much for this video. I love the way this video is made and how you explain your feelings towards this game and breath of the wild. I'm so happy to see more critical videos on totk. These videos are places where I feel relaxed and happy, like near a river
I started to play totk, the beginning was slow to me and when finally things set in, I discovered that if you played balld dlc on botw, the picture would appear in Link's house in Totk. Now I play 2 hours of botw everyday. This game has something so more captivating than Totk
@@vperm9852 She put up a community post telling people to check this video out. My comment is in regards to her being a influencer. She influenced her audience to check this video out. I’m not saying she influenced this person to make the video 👍🏻
The part where you said that things that you could get past or were fine with in Botw that frustrated you in Totk... I actually think that Totk made me scrutinize Botw even more than I had initially. I loved Botw. I could forgive it's issues because it was overshadowed by the incredible thoughtfulness and feats of creativity. I feel like Totk encapsulated on Botw's flaws by trying to be the better Botw, by "copycatting" what made Botw suceesful and special, masacering the identity and legacy of these two games, and almost the franchise as a whole to some degree. Worse, imo it failed to uplift itself as anything remotely worth the purchase or years of waiting and development effort that the team clearly worked hard on. It sacrificed it's own identity and for what? Even when it was trying to be meaningful, everything felt meaningless. It's an utter shame, because my entire experience was much like yours. Seeing the potential in every moment and wishing that they'd taken those routes rather than the asinine mediocrity and disappointing decisions it did
You put it very well - seeing potential in every moment. The game is truly just a series of disappointments. I am very scared for the future of Zelda if this is the direction they continue in
I'll be honest. I dropped the game after collecting the first tears. Not because the game felt bad to me but because I felt betrayed. i watched the trailers and these told me "hey, this time we focus more on the here and now story! You fight with your friend to save hyrule" and what i got was memory collecting again and as I later found out the same dialog over and over again for finishing the dungeons. Watching these videos showing me that Links story from before just got ignored didn't make that sour taste feel better. It's absolutely fine to not be story focused but then please don't give me the feeling it will be in the trailers just so that i can throw out a lot of money for an enhanced breath of the wild which i enjoyed, yes, but never played again because I need at least a bit more substance in the here and now to stay hooked. Which is again a me problem and it's absolutely fine to write your story like that. This just told me that i will now wait when a big zelda title comes out and watch how things unfold first and it makes me sad tbh. There is still this little hope that i misunderstood the trailers and it was my bad but it seems like I am not the only one who is feeling this by now.
I got bored with it after like 9 hours and have not picked it up again, i feel the same of most of what you say but a big problem with me was the story was just not interested by it.
Just a question: If Zelda was in the past and turned herself into a dragon, shouldn’t that dragon appear in Breath of the Wild since it’s stated that she’s been flying around ever since she turned? Or did they come up with that plot point during the development of TOTK and ignored the fact that it wouldn’t make sense cause that would mean 2 master sword and, obviously, 2 Zelda’s existing at the same time?
Even the sky islands were up there (some people think the upheaval raised the islands but it's just poorly named). I think it's implied that there's some sort of magical cloud barrier because in BotW when you hit a dragon with your bow they go into some kinda sky portal and disappear for a bit. So it's presumed that's where zelda and the islands are. It's not explained well, and why the sky islands are falling doesn't seem to be explained either. 2 zeldas and 2 master swords existing at the same time is probably the least problematic part of this.
I never thought I'd be so disappointed in a Zelda game. But man. The longer I think about my time on TOTK the more I think "wow, I hated 87% of that experience" and man it kills me. It was so incredibly disappointing. I was LIVING for age of calamity. And it got me so incredibly HYPED for a true sequel to BOTW. But from the moment TOTK started and they totally dumbed down the beginning journey (why weren't we allowed to have a long quest underground with Zelda like in the first trailer??? WHY) I knew I was in for something disappointing. I really liked the great sky island. And my first few trips to the depths. The rito dungeon lead up, the boss, and the zora waterworks were all awesome. But just about every single other thing was disappointing and it hurt. The spirit temple was something I found super early. I couldn't enter it. So my mind ran wild with what could possibly be in such an amazing dungeon. And I hoped Purah would awaken as the sage. Nope. iPad lady, a sad excuse for a mech, and a recycled rock em sock em robots fight was all I got. The final nail in the coffin was the absolutely abysmal ganondorf. He was so incredibly goofy. The ending and Zeldas sacrifice were awesome. But entirely soured by the rest of the game. ALSO WHERE IS KASS
it it's any consolation, I felt the exact same way about this game, as I did with fallout 4. Could not finish either games, partly due to the mile wide inch deep approach, the complete lack of immersion with respect to events in previous titles, the lazy design and implementation of many in-game systems, and the fact that either game did not respect the time I put into it. Everything felt very surface level with no cohesion.
@@bardicindecision The worst thing is that both games had enormous potential, since they both had rebuilding a broken world as their main selling point. They just did nothing with it, as most of the work seems to have been put into the creative building aspects, like Fallout 4s settlement system (Which was better implemented by modders IMO), and the ultrahand-fuse aspects in Tears, alongside the physics engine. Like why are we restricted to stabilizing signs, dragging carriages and restoring a settlement to its BoTW status (Which is just a glorified fetch quest), when we could do so much more with a power like this? Like restoring outposts and settlements?!? Like if these games end up being so shallow because of this hyperfixation on more difficult-to-implement systems, with no time to actually make the world believable, exiting and fun to roam around in, then the worlds should be smaller than they currently are. BOTWs world was expansive and empty by design, ToTK does not get to make that excuse. Even Elden ring has a limited worldspace, that is not that big geographically, but they fill it with so much stuff and levels (If we take into consideration the underground sections and legacy dungeons) that it seems way bigger than it really is.
Really hope you make more videos! Youre really straightforward, good flow, nice editing, felt very immersed while listening. I have to agree on a lot of your points. I loved botw, put in about 600 hours. I have about 300 in totk. I was okay with totks world, in terms of familarity from botw and the new depths and sky to explore. But what got me the most was the story. The old shrines, the guardians, divine beasts, certain npcs not recognizing link when i really though they would. If theres a time gap between botw and totk, and link is always 2 steps behind zelda, how does nobody remember or recognize? I totally get the new players, but i dont feel that new players would be confused by link being known by others given the clear context theres a prequel, and even in story its well referenced that link 'defeated' ganon just a couple years prior. So seems odd not many npcs remember. It frustrated me so much. Not to mention the dragon tear memories didnt have as much impact as botws memories. I felt it had lore gaps. I really enjoyed your video and sharing your views that i feel a lot of players felt as well. ❤
22:38 The only emotion I was feeling was annoyance. The fact that the "irreversible" eating of a secret stone was whisked away by ghost magic was stupid. While this Zelda deserves a happy ending after all the shit she's went through. I don't like the execution.
M🅱️🅱️🅱️🅱️🅱️F🅱️CK🅱️🅱️, THIS WAS YOUR _FIRST_ VIDEO??????????? God damn, nice work! Just don‘t drop off like as Nintendo has. Nice editing, nice narration; nice EVERYTHING. FFS, i have like 1000 videos up, I might have to reconsider my path here😅
Last year, right before TOTK came out, I played through BOTW for the first time. I rushed through so I could play TOTK at the same time as everyone else, but now I really wish I’d taken my time
For me, tears of the kingdom did feel really frustrating because it overwhelmed me. Breath of the wild was a huge game already but I had the urge to 100% it. ToTK didn't give me that feeling. All those caves, wells, sky islands. I feel like, just the depths and the sky would have cut it. If the overworld itself was more fun to explore, a rebuilt hurdle and such, it would have been satisfying enough. Like this, I played through the dungeons, which honestly I think we're great, and went to beat the final boss (which was also epic and really satisfied me). But I don't see myself playing 3000 hours like I did in breath of the wild (I barely played 100 hours of ToTK). I don't see myself exploring beyond the sky more thoroughly, simply because I feel like it's too much to ever complete, which to me, is really unsatisfactory. That's a personal thing, though. I think ToTK is still a great game. But for me, I want Nintendo to take a step back. I know they do it because people always want more content, but is that really the goal? I want a game that I can truly finish and enjoy and this didn't give me it like every other Zelda game did. There is no catharsis.
The lead-in to the new areas part was great and made me realize: "TotK went to the Ubisoft school of game design!" It's the best summation of (most of) why I dislike it and maybe now that I can put it into words it will stop nagging me. It made the end of the video extremely satisfying!
It's refreshing to hear someone's opinion being similar to mine (long time Zelda gamer), who only started with BotW. I feel like TotK disrespected BotW in so many ways, it's a shame. Nintendo and Zelda team don't see it as such, because of sales numbers. Many new comers to Zelda seem to enjoy this game and they praise ultrahand to heaven and back, but what if you don't care about building things? I didn't care one bit! It's impressive they were able to pull it off on the switch and they should get all the praise for that, but I just don't care about games where I build stuff, which is why I don't enjoy games like minecraft and what not, where you can put in 100's of hours (in my opinion waste your life away) just building random stuff. And then having that mechanic and pass up the opportunity to rebuild Hyrule is insane to me... Huge disappointment.
All the interesting locations that we thought had some hidden lore or meaning that would get some attention here ended up being nothing at all. That tells me that the devs never really cared about making their world feel deep at all with a storied past to uncover. What did they even do for all those years in development? Remember speculating about objects and locations in Ocarina? The game felt mystical and full of history despite it being for the N64. It’s part of what makes Zelda, Zelda.
Them putting in all of the outfits from BOTW and the DLC but not the Gerudo garb made me so sad. I wanna be pretty and I know Link does too. The electric, fire, ice whatever dresses are good and sexy but why have literally everything from the last game except this? It was one of my favorite things from BOTW
The more I think or reminisce on it, the more it makes me wish this Ganondorf had goals or motives like the other ones. While not deep or heavily emphasized, The Wind Wakers version essentially implies that he was jealous of Hyrule's prosperity, meanwhile life in the dessert was marked with death. So for that reason he wanted to take over it. He's not a character that the devs wanted to be sympathetic, since it's quite obvious he's still a malevolent dude. But giving him a motivation as simple as it can be, helps the story not feel like it's orchestrated because "evil guy wants to do evil".
Iirc, Masked Nintendo Bandit discussed an interview with Aonuma and Fujibayashi, they discussed why the Sky was so barren was because the programmers had a ton of issues with how many Sky Islands they previously wanted. May have been why the game got delayed so much. Great video, you succinctly defined all the issues I had with the game as well. Ultimately, I think it comes down to Nintendo having a “gameplay first, everything else second” development mindset. While the game is super fun, there’s a lot of glaring flaws (story, characters, etc.) that keep it from being a masterpiece. Definitely one of the most frustrating games I’ve ever had to assess.
Playing it for only 150 hours is so real though😭 that's almost exact amount of how many hours i've played it, you earn a sub for way too much relatability in this video.
I really like this video of yours thanks to the algorithm of our overlord. My only mild criticism is general audio seems a tad low while some segments of your video focusing on BGM will have said BGM often time louder than your voice which I find distracting.
The biggest let down in this game for me was the sky islands, it felt like there was basically no reason to explore them, and they were so sparse that it didn’t really feel like a 3rd layer of the map. I actually love the depths though, I think that they are a very cool concept. I wish they had done more with them however, I had fun exploring them, but they had so few interesting places that it got boring. I really just wish they had done more with the new layers of the map.
I completely agree with you for all your points. I’ve felt the rise of excitement when I first started the game and being quite disappointed the more I played through the story. It had so much potential to be my favourite 3D Zelda and had some good scenes, but it fell flat on it’s face when it tried to soar. I can only hope in the next 3D entry that they take the narrative, lore, and character dialogue more seriously.
@@dannys6957 I'm not the channel owner lol, but also "bad take" isn't really constructive or informative. I don't agree with every point made 100%, but they put their thoughts and experience into words and shared it, and clearly they're not the only one given these comments. You're allowed to just... not watch things if you're going in with a closed mind
botw was my second zelda game (after minish cap) and i absolutely adored it! i'm glad i stumbled upon reviews like yours, i def won't buy totk now and wait for the next one
It’s funny too, because most things you complain about here, is something pretty much everyone was worried about before the game came UNTIL that final trailer. That final trailer showed everyone, hey, this is a narrative game with an epic story and cool side characters, including hylians all about saving hyrule. After that, EVERYONE was locked in but the game is nothing like that trailer said it would be. One of the most misleading trailers in all of gaming history imo
Furthermore, I personally feel like the cutscenes and the in world story stuff was created by 2 different teams that didn’t talk at all. Because the zonai presented in the cutscenes and the zonai presented by the constructs seem like 2 different entities to me with no cohesion between the two. Why are there only 2 zonai? Did both of them build all of these constructs? Why did they build the constructs? Why do the constructs talk as if there are a lot of zonai, instead of just mentioning the one or both that built them? Are the zonai gods? Where did they come from? The constructs make them seem smart but all they do in cutscenes is sit around. I just cannot fathom that after all the speculation of zonai, the archeaology people pieced together by the fandom, the introduction of this new godly powerful mysterious race was butchered so badly in a series that historically is amazing at introducing a new race, their culture, their structure, their lifestyle etc.
TOTK retroactively makes one thing about BOTW unnecessarily complicated. The Master Sword... So, Master Sword is in the Lost Woods, awesome... But it was pulled back in time 4(?) years later by Zelda so she could let it regain power as it basked in her light energy. And we know that the BOTW/TOTK timelines work by the "it always happened" rule since Ganondorf and the Construct that gives you the Purah Pad both know who Link is... SO IN BREATH OF THE WILD TWO MASTER SWORDS EXIST!?!?!?
It's striking to me how when making BOTW, Nintendo saw fit to break nearly every tradition that OoT established for the 3D Zelda formula that many of us new so well, but when making TOTK the stuck so rigidly to the BOTW formula that, if it weren't for Ultrahand, the two games would be indistinguishable from each other. It makes me worry that Nintendo didn't actually learn anything from BOTW's development and that the series will just get stuck in the same rut it was in after OoT, where every subsequent game is identical to the first one gameplay-wise. The difference being that at least with the old formula, there was room to tell interesting stories, a quality that the new formula is seemingly allergic to. I hate to say it, but if the next 3D Zelda is revealed and it's just the same as the last two, I might just swear off of 3D Zelda for a while.
10k views wow! shoutout to skittybitty to helping this reach people. this ramble is pretty old but channel isn’t quite dead, i’m finally on break from college and far into writing something more juicy where i’m deeppp in my game design shit, sub if you want to see it when it drops 😏
Yes! Cool video!!!
(I wish we went back in time :()
Hey, cudos to your great narration. I’m a long time Zelda fan and have seen a bunch of videos on totk, but you’re strangely eloquent, with a few fucks here and there.
Keep it up, look foward to more essays!
It is typical of corporate fascist UA-cam/Google to reward anti-intellectual propaganda videos such as yours.
No
Why subscribe to anti-intellectual video content that lacks critical, creative and proper thinking? Skittybitty is also not a proper thinker.
One of the most aggravating things about Totk's narrative is how irrelevant Calamity Ganon was to the overall world-building. We literally fight a 1,000-foot tall Malice Boar smack in the middle of Hyrule Field in the last game and no-one seems to have noticed. Even the side-quest where we teach the school kids about the Great Calamity is specifically only about the 10,000 years-ago Calamity, not the more recent iteration. It's as if there's been some great conspiracy in Hyrule to erase all mentions of the literal apocalypse from the historical record.
There's a scene in one of the memories where Zelda tells Rauru she believes Ganondorf has ulterior motives, and that even his name makes her feel uneasy, though she's not sure why. Yes, apparently Zelda is unable to draw any parallels between the names GANONdorf and GANON. Then in a later memory she tells Rauru about how Link once saved Hyrule from "a great evil", specifically not mentioning Calamity Ganon by name.
It's just...how do you make the writing this bad? Were they doing it on purpose, because it sure feels like it.
Yeah I know it feels as if they just deliberately ignored what happened.
@@ProjectionProjects2.7182 It kind of feels like Totk is ASHAMED to be a Botw sequel. It's constantly skirting around every opportunity to bring up and reference events from the previous game, it REALLY doesn't want the two stories to be connected. And in the few extremely rare instances it DOES bring up Botw, it's always an extremely brief mention in a single line of dialogue that ultimately means nothing, goes nowhere, and is immediately discarded and forgotten about.
I have never seen any other sequel do this before, it's so bizarre.
@@zeddessell It is bizarre. I really don't get what the developers were thinking when making the character dialog for this game.
"Its almost as if there's some great conspiracy in Hyrule to erase the memory of any apocalypse ever being mentioned "
Just that quick, you accidentally came up with a plot that wouldve been 100x more interesting than what we got.
@@natesamadhi33 I'm not quite sure how this "great conspiracy" plot would work, given that Zelda herself is supposed to be in charge of Hyrule. But the story we actually got didn't make any sense either, so...
The sequel I had in mind:
- Rebuild Hyrule!
- Cleanse Hyrule of Calamity Ganon’s influence, like the Malice!
- Have the Yiga Clan be the main antagonists!
- NPCs remember you from BotW!
They got the 2nd and last one of those
So basically, making a worse sequel. Got it. 👍
@@Matt-eh2dyyiga being the main baddies wouldn't be great but a sequel that actually deals with the themes and events of the first game? Yeah i would actually enjoy that
@@Windwaker_is_the_goat
Not even the last one. Several locations treat you like you're brand new despite being legacy locations, the worst being Hateno Village -- because the game implies that Link *lived there* with Zelda, but everybody including *Bolson,* the *guy who made the house,* acts like they've never seen you before.
@@mythosinfinite6736 so? I don't really care
Majora’s mask’s is an actual sequel.
Tears Of the Kingdom is a “Master Quest” full of plot holes.
They should have stuck with the story of BOTW, not retcon a lot of it to make goat gods fit. I loved the new Sheikah lore.
So was Phantom Hourglass, and even Spirit Tracks which takes place long after the events of WW and PH but still manages to acknowledge the events of those games while still setting up a brand new world for a brand new Link to explore. You could even take it all the way back to Zelda 2, which is presented as a direct sequel to the original game. Nintendo HAS experience making Zelda sequels in a way that feels satisfying, I liked the DS games, Zelda 2 is one of the most underrated games in the franchise, and Majora’s Mask is not only my favorite game of all time, but one of my favorite pieces of media EVER. That was honestly the main reason I was so excited for TotK, because it looked like it was going to be a lot darker in the way that MM took a much darker direction than OoT, but it was just kinda… meh
@@data_expunged97the only way I can beat TOTK, is to play it as a sequel to actually “Spirit Tracks”
It’s the only way I can get all the lore to fit in canon.
That’s why theirs a new Hyrule, and a new Ganon. Link wearing a different colour instead of Green.
That’s why there’s vehicle and technology in the ancient past.
@@GoronMerchant yeah, I would have loved a sequel that was similar to the direction Spirit Tracks took, with a new generation in a Hyrule that’s been rebuilt. It would have been so much easier to explain things like the disappearance of the Sheikah tech, they could have said that the people of Hyrule destroyed it since it played such a significant role in the initial calamity, which isn’t a perfect explanation but it’s still miles ahead of “it just fucked off overnight”
@@data_expunged97 that is the canon reason with the Sheikah tech that why you can’t see them when Hyrule floats into the sky
But they still use it in some case, so it ends up being one big plot hole.
I really don’t like that they used time travel, and made Zonai goat people in this game.
I rather them just use Sheika Physics and Tech/Magic lore in the sequel, like it was leading in the ending of BOTW.
The reason I mention Spirit tracks, these two games are the sequel to Wind Waker Links family tree.
That is why things are so different, yet similar. That’s reason we can have a new imprisoning War.
Both games are set in the future, even Raru’s Era.
Thats the only way I can have fun with this game. To play it like a successor to SP.
I would have loved a good sequel to BOTW, one that’s not just copy/paste and Goat powers. We did not get that. We got a okay/mid one after 6 years.
@@data_expunged97 Darker doesn't mean better.
I will defend botw’s story until I die. I think the flashback heavy narrative was the whole point. There’s a bittersweet melancholy feeling when you see these cutscenes. The more you see and the more you end up connecting with the characters through these cutscenes the more it ends up feeling even more like a tragedy. It's a unique way if storytelling that I think really worked and added to the atmosphere of the game
@@idkidkidk170 Yeah i think the cutscene story delivery could not have worked for any game but BOTW. the constant conversations-about-what-just-happened-or-will-happen instead of showing-what-actually-happened thing makes me enjoy them less, but still. Worked way better for BOTW than TOTK as a delivery method.
I agree BOTW story felt like it made more sense for you to find these story moments out in the wild because it was Link going back to places to recognizes to rebuild his memories. It made sense within the context of the game. TOTK reuses the system from BOTW for the glyphs but it feels so cynical in comparison because it lacked that context and felt arbitrary.
I remember specifically having an "oh...." moment when I tracked down one of the flashbacks where the gang was at the fountain doing their things (and this was after I had found a bunch of the others beforehand). Knowing what would happen and seeing them all together and lively had this profound effect when the flashback faded to my current Link, wearing a mishmash of found armor, standing in fountain ruins during the sunset, all alone and in utter silence with nothing but wind in the background. Not a soul for miles except for him. The game always loads back in this way after the flashbacks, but the juxtaposition of the flashbacks tone against the silence of the present and the time of day made the moment feel bitter and lonesome, almost like Link was aware of exactly what he lost and how badly he failed. It was a handful of somber moments like that that made me feel the BOTW story was always good, and I still think its better delivered than TOTK
In BOTW, Links had a relationship/history with the Sages. In TOTK, this feels forced. How did the Champions remember Link, but Hateno villagers did not?
a banger‼️ this was awesome
we all hating together, love to see it
haters unite 🤝
Building the biggest hater network 1 video at a time 🙏
Skibidi
@@The_Music_Engineergame deserves the hate tho 💀 shit is ASS
Lovely video! Hatano was the first place I went too right after I got the paraglider and when I realized that nobody really knew Link, I just felt so disappointed. It truly feels like Totk is embarrassed to be a sequel.
embarassed to be a sequel… exactly!!!!
Indeed, instead they opted for a remake (shrines, memories-based story, identical dungeons (five switches), koroks…). Quite a let down. Would have been nice with a story in the present with Link initially caught in the Depths. Imagine Kooga meeting Ganonfdorf…
I feel like the protagonist should have been Zelda. I mean, she goes to the past where all the interesting shit happens.
that would solve so many problems (people not remembering link or the calamity, everything sheikah vanishing off the face of the earth, the map being exactly the same with no incentive to explore it)
Playing as Zelda trying to get back to the present would have been awesome.
This is my new favorite Joseph Anderson Video
IK I want him to make one for totk haha
@@colecube8251He does have a lot of clips compiled Bout TOTK. Really hood deconstruction of yhe game btw, you should check it out.
making everyone forget Link was a huge mistake. I also agree that the champions were not supposed to be ghosts at first. Probably their teleporting and collision was just too hard to make realistic.
I really don’t understand why they made link be forgotten to some NPCs. Like is it really going to confuse new players that an NPC knows your name?????? How would that make anyone confused?? Countless games start in a town, and you talk to npcs and everyone calls you by your name and as if there’s history there. They’re acting like it was such a difficult realistic concept,, when it’s completely realistic to begin with
150 hours is exactly how long I put into TotK before going back to test and confirm I indeed still love BotW after feeling so disappointed by TotK
"Zelda sounds like she's on the verge of crying or passing out" that's a hilarious way to describe that insanely irritating voice, everytime she talks I mute the game
She sounds like she has COPD
10:14 see but thats the thing! link was never just an empty husk for the player to inhibit and control, he was always character with his own personality that was reflected in cutscenes, animations, and the game play. botw back tracked this and totk outright denies link's character :(
@@Hammy000 you’re right 🥲
it made sense in botw because he was asleep for 100 years then dealing with amnesia after all, but in totk there’s just no excuse..
I would have liked to see more little settlements and mini villages starting up where old ruins had been in BOTW. When I first saw the Hudson building material spots, I had thought there would be a quest to help build a small village with all Link's new powers...
Edit: I completely forgot about repairing Lurelin bc it was that insignificant...
Rebuilding luerlin is pointless. You're just putting it back how it was in BotW. It's not new it's the same settlement that already existed.
@@ralcogaming7674 Ya I know, that's why I completely forgot about the experience. I was simply rebuilding what had already been there. I wish the game had something new to create aside from the weird custom house.
BRUVVVVVV YESSS!!!!!! This is exactly what I said. I thought the Hudson quest was a buildup (no pun intended) to have mini villiages or to have small houses around the map that NPCs can move into. But gurlllllll they ain’t do nothing with it!!!!!!! Ahh it’s madness. Especially with castle town. The materials are right there!!! The foundations are built and right there !!!
i was so sad we didnt get any new villages LIKE THERE IS ROOM??
I'm exactly in the same boat as you, I wanted to love it so bad. I watched a no-spoiler review of the game from a guy who got it early about 5 days before release, he said it destroys Breath of the Wild in every single way and goes beyond, and that gave me a lot of hope. But when I played it I couldn't shake the feeling that something was wrong, from the lack of explanation of the Sheikah tech to no one recognizing you in Hateno... All my Nintendo-fan friends called me crazy, later they also defended the 4 times same cutscene thing and I realized they probably would defend anything because it's Zelda. I'm glad to finally see videos addressing what I've been feeling since day one.
I'm sorry you had to go through that. I got skewered for saying TotK was lame and BotW was a bit overhyped. You're not crazy, nothing is perfect and criticism is important because it helps us to improve. Unfortunately, with responses from Aonuma and his thoughts about the game's success I'm in fear for the Zelda franchise
I wrote this video at the peak of TOTK hype when barely anyone seemed to be pointing out the glaring issues. The shower of praise you described was a huge part of why I made the vid. Hype blindness is real
I have a Zelda tattoo fam and I’ll be the first to tell you this game is ass lmao I never even finished it. I’m currently on ganondorf and I just got bored and haven’t picked the game up since lmao
@@bardicindecision And you have the most impressionable audience: people too young to play the older games with lore and story, then the people today too young to play BOTW to see what TOTK really is.
And I think Nintendo, who caters to kids, knows this. They made their billions, got lazy, and no longer care about story and lore. Just flashy action and cool scenes. And unsurprisingly, kids eat it up. Us old folks are wondering what happened instead.
I've never played the Switch zelda games, but from most of the takes ive seen on the game it seems like the developers were too scared of adding anything new for fear of BOTW fans not liking the new game, which ironically caused BOTW fans to not like the game, its super interesting to me
@@Simply_NoroYT Yup sounds about right. Classic case of fear from companies & disconnect with their audiencies leading to a lack of risktaking and their fears coming true
@@bardicindecision "Classic case"? You got any more examples? Can't think of many examples off the top of my head but the Tomb Raider series might fit?
@@Takejiro24The mob vote for Minecraft comes to mind. Microsoft/mojang is afraid of adding too much to Minecraft which made lots of Minecraft fans angry
@@Takejiro24 the behavior of AAA companies all over the place, making very “safe” decisions artistically which end up being so bland they lose audience interest and a bajillion dollars. Suicide Squad, that new hero shooter Concord everyone’s dunking on, etc etc
That’s a pretty good reason why totk fell short for me, they didn’t try to improve the game
When I play BOTW, I miss the abilities in TOTK. When I play TOTK, I miss playing BOTW.
Sound stupid
i love reviews where the creator sounds so tired and dissapointed the entire time haha, great job.
The story is the most egregious part of this game. In BotW it makes sense for the story to be told through fragmented memories; Link has amnesia and has to piece together his past, and since everything happened so long ago, it doesn't have an immediate effect on the present. If the player decides to prioritize exploration over playing the story, it makes sense for Link to do this as he doesn't remember his past and doesn't have an emotional connection with this world and these characters. Once the player discovers the memories, they may become compelled to save Zelda, as they now understand Link's conncection to these characters. With TotK there is no reason for the story to be told in this way. There is an active narrative in the present, characters we interact with that contribute to the story. I'm certain the only reason they had Zelda go back in time was so they could repeat this narrative structure; this time, it is even messier in execution, and does not fit thematically like BotW's story did.
Also, the dead champions in BotW had more depth than the sages in the present, and especially more than the sages of the past. Mipha's unrequited love, Revali's jealousy of Link, Urbosa becoming a mother figure to Zelda after the death of her mother... These characters are far more interesting than the sages. The sages have little to no depth; the game tries to introduce "character arcs" for some of the sages, but you won't remember them anyway because they're introduced and resolved through dialogue, rather than shown through cutscenes like with the champions. The dialogue after Tulin fights a monster before partnering up with Link and when Sidon reflects on Mipha are examples of this, but calling them character arcs is generous, as there's almost no depth to these interactions. To add insult to injury, the characters introduced in the past have no depth at all. And scenes where they interact with Ganondorf make them seem incompetent, making it hard for me to like these characters in any way.
And don't get me started on the identical, repeated cutscenes... Nintendo was incredibly lazy handling the story in a game that needed a more present narrative.
honestly i feel like daruk is more like an uncle figure to link like how urbosa is a mother fig to zelda ^^
@@Somarimanga Oh yeah, for sure. I didn't mention Daruk but he's also way more interesting than TotK's characters. I don't think he has as much depth as the others, but he does have a distinct personality, which the new characters introduced in TotK don't; Raaru and Sonia are pretty much blank slates. Daruk is protective of the other champions, enjoys joking around, and has his quirks that make him interesting (being scared of dogs).
One of the major drawbacks is not being able to rebuild Hyrule. It was sad because I thought doing all the Bolson minichallenges around the map would unlock the ability to rebuild Hyrule Castle, or the mini challenges would make tiny houses be built around the map. The story also didn’t captivate me. Nothing significant was really added to the lore..and the creators didn’t really seem interested in the lore either. This game just didn’t feel right
I agree! 🤔
The feeling when you have to go through 50 lines of dialogue just to take out your horse
I have no idea what went wrong in the Nintendo office between Botw and Totk. Something must've been horrifically wrong for this to be the final product.
Nothing went wrong, Aonuma cares way more about gameplay then narrative or anything else. They spent a shit load of time designing and perfecting the new mechanics, and then building a huge new playground with 3 levels to play with it in. That’s what the game really is and everything surrounding it is just the package it came in
@@jchud13Aonuma should have made a spin-off instead of making the worst Zelda ever, even worse than Skyward Sword and only surpassed by the CDI games and Four Swords.
@@jchud13Problem with that for me is for a third of the game, and that's being generous to the sky islands, the map wasn't designed with ultra hand in mind leading the gameplay system to feel incredibly shallow.
What went wrong was the unanimous praise botw received from players despite it being a very mid flawed game imo. I enjoyed botw for maybe 20-30 hours before my experience soured. After my first 2 divine beast I realized the game was extremely dumbed down compared to previous Zelda games before it. Aunouma was like “oh you all like this s*** huh!?” So players like doing boring soulless repetitive task spread across an enormous map ?🤔 F*** it triple the map size and give them more repetitive crap to do again and they’ll surely jizz their pants 👖 💦 🤦 “oh you like finding 900 korok seeds and being gifted golden S*** huh !? Well here’s more of that s*** “! 😂🤦
So, i'm new to zelda, i started with BotW. I played it the last time maybe a year ago, and at the time i didn't even know that the "sequel" was in development until i have beaten the game. I was hyped, as BotW was something for me. It was my favourite open world game ever. The amount of things you could do just blew my mind. So then they teased TotK more, we got all this new trailers, and it looked cool, but i had this weird feeling that it felt more like a DLC than a full blown sequel. But anyway, i waited. Then the game came out, and i couldn't play it, because my switch was stolen. So i said fuck it, downloaded an emulator and tried it. And it was fun... For the first couple of hours. Then i was shocked as i continued playing it. The sheikah technology? Yeah, let's just pretend it never existed. The guardians? Nah, fuck it, we'll leave you one at the hateno's research lab and that's it. There was so many fucking cool things that could be done with the guardians. Just imagine going to the underworld, and then you hear that terrifying sound from your past. At least as a secret boss or something. But no. The game treats BotW almost like it never existed. I found the shrine of ressurection, and was disappointed to find just some stupid cave with yiga enemies and one construct. And then yes, the Hateno village treats you like you've never been here before. After you save Lurelin the same shit happens. No one recognises you. The only dungeon i enjoyed was probably the pyramid, and the entire gerudo quest. But i fucking despised the Gorons quest, their entire village, the dungeon, i hated it. The game is fun sometimes. I plan on buying a new switch, thankfully i have BotW on my account, and than i'll try to 100% it. Than i will try TotK again, but the only thing i know for sure, is that i miss BotW. I didn't know who Ganon really was when i played BotW, so i enjoyed this villain. Then i knew it was Ganondorf, and hated it. Let's just face it, the Ganon even sounds better than Ganondorf, but most importantly, it looks better too. The prologue was great though.
Update: Building stuff is just annoying in this game. The rotation is a nightmare, and how it sticks sometimes not like you want it to was so annoying.
omg yeah, having the guardians fallen into the depths and then you hear one just before it lights up??
the fact that the yiga couldve stolen a couple guardians and brought them to the depths like the idea is RIGHT there. i kinda get why they disappeared, maybe they were destroyed for safety concerns BUT STILL. the idea of seeing the guardian lights in the darkness with the music starting and the laser wouldve been so cool and terrifying
I played BoTW for an unholy amount of hours, especially during my Bachelor's Thesis. Then a guy in my student dorms lent to me ToK. He was rather disappointed by it. He told me that maybe this was because He wasn't such a huge BoTW fun, he admitted he liked it but nothing more.
I played it for 10 hours and then dropped it, didn't even reach one of the main dungeons . At the start, especially the tutorial I had lots of fun, until I started nosing around the map and everything fell apart.
I was curious about the old tech, the Shika one. I hadn't read the interview about it, so i was 100% sure it had been gutted and i would only find empty husks of the shrines and so long.
Haetano, nobody remembers/knows you.
The world felt static.
Such a shame and waste of money in my opinion (If you enjoyed it good for you eh, it's not a slight, it's just an observation about the tag price)
I get that they wanted tabula rasa or some such, but this is fucking preposterous and if you add that bloody interview, well..I guess that they had to make a game more than a sequel.
I feel like a lot of the people who spent 100s of hours in BotW were expecting TotK to fix the big issues of BotW. Nintendo did fix a lot of smaller issued and gave most of it a new coat of paint to make it look different, but under the surface TotK is virtually just the same game with the exact same big flaws as BotW, and it was truly disappointing to so many of us.
Great video, you bring up good points and illustrate very well why I was addicted to Tears of the Kingdom for two months and afterwards I haven't felt like playing it and have felt more in the mood to watch all the essays about it being disappointing instead.
Also, I loved Breath of the Wild, but my biggest issue with it was that it didn't have any cats and that you couldn't pet the dogs and in Tears of the Kingdom none of those issues were solved and I know it's not important, but Nintendo should have understood how happy those things would have made people, like "game has cat and you can pet animals" is a net positive.
Im literally the same boat as you lol.I have not gone back to the game in MONTHS and have been just watching these videos.
i think a good chunk of this games problems could have been solved by it being later than it was, because right now most of the world hasnt changed much since the calamity
very true. imagine if it took place when zelda had fully taken her place on the throne and the rebuilding of hyrule was in full swing…. way more interesting than a bunch of rinky dink towns
Or the complete opposite! Throw Link in the past with Zelda!
Imagine if we got to play as old buff link with a beard
@@themc3140I've been banging on this drum for awhile. I want old man Link being the knight protector for a young but magically gifted Zelda
@@bardicindecision Yes! If they had all this time to build new Towers, Dismantle everything else from BOTW (Divine Beast, Shrines, Towers, Guardians etc), they should have made much more significant progress in Hyrule. They could have easily had the overworld be somewhat rebuilt, Hyrule Castle seeing vast improvements and the such, and then as the main quest as it was taking place below Hyrule Castle, the Depths could have been the "darkworld" of a Link to the Past or something similar. Forgo the sky islands and focus on the depths as the additional play world. I mean Gloom was coming out of the ground - kind of makes sense to have the baddies be underground for the most part with some on the surface as you traveled trying to gain necessary instructions from the NPCs and villages.
Nice video! The sign guy was my last straw. I showed him how to fix >20 signs and he still didn’t learn anything?! No pity for that fool
honestly my feelings for tears of the Kingdom can be summed up by its Kakariko Village. its got some new nooks and crannies to crawl into with not much worth finding, but its the same place now with a whole lotta sky garbage dumped on it and a deep gaping hole that leads to a Nyctophobic's nightmare.
I think I said it elsewhere but TotK fails as both a standalone title and as a sequel simply because it doesn't have enough original material to stand on and not enough ties connecting it to its older brother and yet somehow still feels like DLC. the things I liked about it can't outweigh the things I don't. and this is coming from someone who found every single Shrine, Lightroot, Armor set, Sage Vow and Bubblefrog/cave.
I was really hoping that Castle town was going to get a Tarry town treatment: gathering materials and people to rebuild it to its former glory, maybe a fun chain where you go around gathering the wandering Merchants to make a Market district so you don't have to hunt them down on the road when you need something or the homeless travelers to build a place to for them to call home safe from all the monsters, Lookout Landing is a hole in the ground and the novelty of it being an underground bunker and freaking out the guard by just ascending through the roof wore off pretty fast, I was hoping there would be some level of base upgrading where the Landing would expand out into Castletown as you solved more of the other races problems, they lend their skills to help build things:
you helpled the Zora so the Fountain can now be fixed cus Puddles from the feesh-peeps is a hydro-engineer and knows what to do to get the fountain working again, Biggest of Bois from the Goron developed a technique to smack stones so they break to be perfectly square to rebuild the cobblestone streets and so on, what would have been real cool as well is rebuilding Lon Lon Ranch so you could catch and sell wild horses as a way to get rupees outside mining and selling gems or gathering a colossal amount of frozen meat.
and yes I did do the Super cold Day Dupe I needed the money and Didn't want to go caving for shiny rocks.) Once I spent so long in the depths that when I returned to the surface my _Eyes hurt_ since they had _adjusted to looking at low light environments_ and it happened to be smack in the middle of the day when I went back to the top, I legit camped out on top of a mountain to watch the sun rise and help my eyes readjust to the normal brightness.
I feel like if the dragon Tear cutscenes were given to you in order like you complete certain points a new drop glyph shows up somewhere like Zelda basically sending Link messages in bottles through time up until you realize _how_ she's doing it, because let me just say that I found out what Zelda did before the reveal that you were chasing a puppet and it just absolutely killed some of the reveals for me, even though I found the glyphs in order by taking photos from the temple walls from left to right.
they also never really do anything about Link's Gloom infection, even when you get all the light balls there's no "you are fully purged from gloom", its just some creepy Zonai outfit.
I kind of wanted a trial of the Champion 2.0 dungeon where you basically go in to a secret dungeon Temple to fully expunge the gloom and it makes some kind of Gloom based shadow-Link as a boss, Like how they made the Temple of time dungeon from Twilight princess. heck they could have used Sonia as the ghost guide.
the other Ideal idea is just yeet both Zelda and Link to the past and have the game take place there, a similar enough Hyrule but different enough that its not breath of the wild copy pasted with a bunch of crap dropped on it and a bunch of random holes stabbed in it. the two of them trying to find out how they got to the past, why Sh!t was getting f*cked up in their present, who that dry hunk of meat they found was, Purging Link of his gloom infection and restoring the Master Sword. ending the game with the classic Link Vs Ganon fight starting with Rauru's sacrifice, Link and Zelda going into stasis together to complete the fight in the present from the moment their past selves falling into the past, it would give Ganon a better reason to Go F*ck it and eat his stone.
I ain’t readin allat
@@Cfreezy12 I don't speak bad grammar.
can you translate that?
Great video! I'll never get sick of TOTK reviews, because man... the game left me feeling so hollow. I was so hyped for it and it just felt like Breath Of The Wild Remixed. I haven't finished the game, and I dunno if I want to go back and finish it. It feels like a microwaved version of BOTW. There are some spots that are hot and tasty, but most of it has been melted into mush.
Hollow is really the best way to put it. Total opposite of how BOTW made me feel.
Thank goodness for the algorithm; this was lovely and so spot on.
I’m an older Zelda fan (elder millennial) and wholeheartedly embraced BOTW’s new approach, so I wondered if my issues were due to stubbornness or what. But this was very validating.
I only gave TOTK about 10-15 hours of my time and just couldn’t get invested. I’m glad to see that saving my time was the best move because yikes. Finding out that folks don’t even REMEMBER WHAT I DID under some silly notion it’s exclusionary to new players is almost insulting. At least majoras mask totally changed your environment and the game play loop.
I loved this video so much. Subscribed!
a great video~
man, the point on narrative design, and them losing the plot... like, yes, I've been a long-time fan. I grew up on Wind Waker and Oracle of Ages, so I may be a little biased. but I just feel like they were so much better at telling a straightforward narrative before!! what happened???
even comparing something like TotK!Ganondorf to his counterpart in Wind Waker feels straight-up unfair. with less dialog and fewer appearances, WW!Ganon is INFINITELY more fascinating, as a ghost of a man who clings to his dreams of past conquests and "doing it all again, but for real". that character still makes me FEEL something
i just like how you're typing his name with the title like an undertale au thing like Swap!sans or some shi love it lol
Not really.
Feel very petty at times.
Hope her level design video have actual substance
Never played tears of the kingdom cus my brother hogs our switch. But all of these new good “TOTK is disappointing” essays produced by first timers are making me re-examine my excuses for why I’m not swallowing my pride and making some video essays of my own.
Or maybe you can have a little of personality and play the game and have your own opinión.
Crazy I know.
it always feels like such good luck to find a good video from a little channel
Glad you enjoyed! :)
Hey just wanted to let you know your video is awesome, please make more! Awesome flow, fun script, great editing. I'll give you the highest compliment there is: I ate dinner watching it. You got my sub!
As a fellow youtube with dinner watcher I’m legitimately honored
arguably the most relatable tears essays ive watched
My weird experience was that I did the whole master sword/knowing zelda is a dragon quest-and then after i still had to do the quest where I'm walking around investigating the fake zeldas all over the world without the ability to tell anyone that I know for a fact what happened to the real zelda so I know for a fact that this is a fake zelda-the non linearity just made the experience make no sense
This is one of my favourite TotK critiques. I absolutely love how articulate and well expressed you are. Excellent video!!
Just finished watching this video, went to your channel and was completely confused as to how you have no other videos, and then saw how little views and subscribers you have and was even more confused just because of the absolute quality of this video as to how small your channel is!
Honestly I enjoyed every part of it, you make some great points and your commentary sounds just like commentary from a creator with 10s of 1000s of subs with your clarity of speech and well-thought-of script
You should really consider making some more content on UA-cam, and hopefully you get some more attention because you 100% deserve it!
This is so encouraging, thank you!! 😭
I think you're the first person I've seen call out the missed opportunity to have Link help more with rebuilding Hyrule using the new abilities, even if only incidentally. That's a really cool idea that feels so underdeveloped.
I was just playing last night and noting the clear disconnect between level design and game mechanics. You have a clip where you make a hover bike in the fire temple... exactly! Why did the level designers go through all the trouble meticulously laying out railroad tracks/puzzles if the whole thing can be cheesed by flying? This is literally true of every new level (sky temple, Gerudo desert sandstorm, basically all of the sky islands... everything). In order to enjoy the game the level designers intended, you have to intentionally & knowingly handicap yourself: that's bad level/game design.
The most frustrating part for me is they did not connect the Breathe of the Wild lore to Tears of Kingdom lore! it's like they scrap most of the BOTW lore even though we know it's only few years apart till TOTK happened!
The sheikh's history and lore are almost non-existent on TOTK, another frustrating is Zelda literally takes over the house that link bought on BOTW.
They really wanted to have their cake and eat it too. In botw, it is made clear from the start that the champions lost 100 years ago, so the memory cutscenes don't have to worry about advancing the plot. They just exist to show small moments between Link and Zelda/the champions. You can view the memories in pretty much any order and still come away understanding what happened.
But with totk, they wanted to have a more complicated plot. But instead of coming up with some way to organically feed you that story, they just copied the same system as botw. So now you have a bunch of cutscenes that actually build off of each other, but you can still view them in any order. Which means that, if you want the best experience with the story, you have to go out of your way to avoid getting any cutscenes early even if its way more convenient to do them out of order (Why is the cutscene where Sonia dies all the way on the bottom right corner of the map, but the one immediately after that where Zelda is holding her dead body is on the upper left corner? ESPECIALLY WHEN THE GAME URGES YOU TO GO TO THE REGION IN THE TOP LEFT FIRST!).
I find totk to be way more fun when i force myself to do things that aren't "optimal." But I shouldn't have to balance the game for myself just to make it fun.
The game urges you to go for the bottom right corner as well, there are many Lurelin NPCs asking for help about their pirates problem. The cutscene with "Zelda" attacking Sonia was the SECOND cutscene of the tears I have seen after the first one from Impa. I knew the whole story before I reached the other tears. I was hoping at first that it wasn't that big of adeal, maybe it will show some other significant events or just.. something interesting in general but half of the tears are just buildup to that moment! I was very disappointed
I feel like they could have fixed that by having the cutscenes in a set order, and whenever you find a new tear it gives you the next cutscene. At least you would always get them in order
i 100% had my issues with BOTW, but the world design and all the new shit was so cool and interesting that i kept coming back and i kept wanting to come back. with TOTK, like u said, its like a FUCKING UBISOFT game dude ! like i play and i get bored cause its all the same uninspired shit plastered everywhere. it feels like they took the masterful world design of BOTW, the literal handcrafted perfectly explorable world, the size, distance, and traversal of the map, shrines/landmarks that had accompanying lore to fit into and explain the world, and then with TOTK they literally took a shit on all of that and they.. remixed the world, instead of actually expanding on it, or showing its growth ? in doing so fucking up a bunch of lore and continuity for no actual reason or even worse no reason at all because they.. couldnt be bothered to even think of one i guess *cough* sheikah tech *cough*
I've developed a hobby watching Totk experiences/critique. This was really good.
I grew up with Zelda 1, didn't give that much attention. Fell in love with Zelda 2, got hyped over Zelda 3 and wasn't disappointed. Then Oot came, and it was just too much pausing for me, too much dialog. Today i really miss the music and the mystery.
This explains my thoughts very clearly
i really like the feeling this video has, feels like i’m talking with a friend, it has this honest and cozy vibe to it, cool
i just finished totk a few days ago. couldnt figure out why i wasnt excited to keep playing like i was in botw
Great video!
What really struck me with TotK was that I just wanted to get dungeons (and shrines) over with as fast as possible, whereas dungeons used to be a highlight for me. I didn't mind the Divine Beasts so much, but I was ready for something a bit more compelling with TotK.
I also just keep wondering why the depths were so empty...
My initial thoughts on what the game would be was that Hyrule would be shattered in all sorts of pieces revealing a new surface (the depths, I guess). You could minimize changes to Hyrule in that way, and the new shrines would be revealed in this new surface (again, the depths).
Another idea was having the Surface of Hyrule choked by a miasma that was extremely dagerous and you could travel to the depth to trigger shrines connected to light roots that sprout a tree on the surface that clear the miasma (sorta like how areas of the depths are revealed). Stuff like the fairies could have fallen in the depths and as you cleared the miasma, you could work with Purah to reactivate old Sheika shrines. Denizens of Hyrule might be infected by the miasma, and you'd need to rescue them. Some chunks of Hyrule would have risen and be designed evacuation zones for everybody escaping the miasma.
The changes to Hyrule in TotK seem so awkward to me, because the map was designed for BotW. The removal of all the Sheika technology seems so baffling. Why remove all of that stuff? It's extra work for nothing, and the "mysteriously disappeared" explanation is idiotic and frustrating. I don't get this game at all...
They did everything almost exactly the same, and I kept wondering why. I had so many ideas before the game, and I kept having them as I played, but I kept getting confronted with sameness. At 300+, I tried my damndest to find new things. I really wanted to love this game too, but it's disappointing I wasted so much time on it searching for something I never found.
what's weird about all these type of videos is that I find myself agreeing with a decent amount of the video. And then I go back and play the game and completely love it.
Rare case of levelheadeness. There are plenty of games I love that have received scathing and completely valid critiques. It's okay to enjoy something despite its flaws.
You have personality.
Congratulations
Totk case people aré just being petty.
Every minimal detail and they make a big deal about that.
When I first played at launch I felt so Bleh…I’ve done this before,. It was a big weight on my mind so after 20hrs of the game I was just scrolling UA-cam watching spoiler free reviews and so many were saying my thoughts were wrong so I was gaslit into thinking other wise. Then 6 months to a year later so many content creators I watched for Zelda content came out with opinions that I had a felt. Finally so weight lifted. Still haven’t beat it, 150hrs in and doing like 2hr sessions and have no care for spoilers. I will definitely go back to botw. Idk about tears
The thing you mentioned about making it friendly to new players is the fact that BOTW has a bunch of shit relating to the other games, like Zelda fans were constantly talking about it and you know what that made me, a person who started out with botw do?, want to play the other games so I can get hyped when I replay and see the Easter eggs too. I immediately bought Skyward Sword HD when I could bc the switch is the only console I have and I was VERY excited to play another Zelda title. (And I absolutely fell in love with SS)
They had a real opportunity to have ppl want to buy botw if they had played totk bc huh this guy seems important, I wonder how that developed in game 1. But instead, ppl are instead saying to not play botw bc they are basically the same game but different.
Botw felt extremely thought out, the different way ppl interact with you based on how you explored? Like how the Zora king and sidon respond to you different if you met sidon or if you found a way there without doing that? There are countless other examples that I can't think of.
The lack of calamity stuff is the most egregious thing to me, when I had to teach those kids about the calamity 10k yrs ago I was extremely confused. Why would the kids who was raised in calamity's time not know about the calamity? Thier PARENTS grew up during the same time, and even grandparents. Like a century went by and everyone greaved as if it was yesterday, 6yrs go by and all of a sudden know one know what calamity Ganon is? What malice is? The Zora especially pissed me off, 100 years to them is like 2 yrs, they should still be deep in thier mourning of Mipha. I get they need to actually need to start the moving on process but like, it feels like the completely forgot.
Teba, Revali's number one mega fan, didn't mention his son can do what his hero did but sideways??? Wasn't going crazy with pride that omg my son is like one of our greatest warriors. He doesn't even mention him by name when giving him that bow. (Idk rito lore but they made it seem pretty rare for a rito to be able to control the wind like that, like no other Rito seems to be able to do that. I think there should be alot more hype around that)
Why is there a lack of reaction from the gerudo about Ganondorf? Or the shiekah?
16:22 THIS I actually had more fun playing like I was in botw bc I just couldn't be bothered to make stuff with ultrahand. It's to precision based, to time consuming, and for what? A cool thing that disappears before I can have to really fun. Or a thing that makes fighting more chaotic? Things got chaotic with 2 sticks and a bomb rune, adding a glue stick mech to the mix isn't really doing anything but making things overwhelming. I can kill everything before my cool thing even gets a good rhythm of attack.
21:49 THIS. Let me explain my relationship with how I thought Zelda was gonna be in this game. to start it off, Nintendo released SSHD. My silly little brain thought they were trying to tell us something about TOTK , so I IMMEDIATELY got it bc I had never played it before and I was excited to see how it would parallel with the newsr game. Fast forward to actually playing TOTK I'm sitting here thinking that we are about to get a reverse SS. Follow Zelda through the past this time,or have link go to the past and have Zelda steadily build up hyrule in the future as she tries to research and find link. Have paya follow her around since impa is old or something.
Zelda is all about research she should be in kakariko studying the zonai. she should be trying to dig into the past to figure out what a secret stone is,or who Ganondorf actually is. Link can fuck around in the sky with the zonai.
Just like how link has to help Zelda in the present and then help her in the past.
Zelda turns into a dragon and it reminds me of how hylia/zelda put herself to sleep to help link in the future.
And then in the end of the game they reverse her decision, like nit herself the ghosts of her psudeo goat parents. It felt like a much less thought out SS plot
I'm in the same boat, I wanted to LOVE this game but it left me feeling so much and so little
3:32 I don't agree with the notion that the verticality ruins exploration. The issue does definitely lay with the fact that it's the same map, so you've already seen most of the big stuff like you said. Not enough is changed on the ground level for me to try and actually enjoy exploring because I've already seen it all with Botw.
I was shocked to see one video on your channel. This is seriously excellent.
Thank you so much for this video. I love the way this video is made and how you explain your feelings towards this game and breath of the wild. I'm so happy to see more critical videos on totk. These videos are places where I feel relaxed and happy, like near a river
This makes me very happy. Thank you!
YOU NEED TO MAKE MORE VIDEOS!!!(I live this video's realness, and the slight bits of humor mixed in (tyler the creator falling into the depths))
I started to play totk, the beginning was slow to me and when finally things set in, I discovered that if you played balld dlc on botw, the picture would appear in Link's house in Totk. Now I play 2 hours of botw everyday. This game has something so more captivating than Totk
skitty out here influencing and shi
This was out before skitty
@@vperm9852 She put up a community post telling people to check this video out. My comment is in regards to her being a influencer. She influenced her audience to check this video out. I’m not saying she influenced this person to make the video 👍🏻
@@joshuatealeaves oh okay
@@joshuatealeavesskitty uses they/them pronouns i believe!
The part where you said that things that you could get past or were fine with in Botw that frustrated you in Totk... I actually think that Totk made me scrutinize Botw even more than I had initially. I loved Botw. I could forgive it's issues because it was overshadowed by the incredible thoughtfulness and feats of creativity. I feel like Totk encapsulated on Botw's flaws by trying to be the better Botw, by "copycatting" what made Botw suceesful and special, masacering the identity and legacy of these two games, and almost the franchise as a whole to some degree. Worse, imo it failed to uplift itself as anything remotely worth the purchase or years of waiting and development effort that the team clearly worked hard on. It sacrificed it's own identity and for what? Even when it was trying to be meaningful, everything felt meaningless. It's an utter shame, because my entire experience was much like yours. Seeing the potential in every moment and wishing that they'd taken those routes rather than the asinine mediocrity and disappointing decisions it did
You put it very well - seeing potential in every moment. The game is truly just a series of disappointments. I am very scared for the future of Zelda if this is the direction they continue in
I'll be honest. I dropped the game after collecting the first tears. Not because the game felt bad to me but because I felt betrayed. i watched the trailers and these told me "hey, this time we focus more on the here and now story! You fight with your friend to save hyrule" and what i got was memory collecting again and as I later found out the same dialog over and over again for finishing the dungeons. Watching these videos showing me that Links story from before just got ignored didn't make that sour taste feel better.
It's absolutely fine to not be story focused but then please don't give me the feeling it will be in the trailers just so that i can throw out a lot of money for an enhanced breath of the wild which i enjoyed, yes, but never played again because I need at least a bit more substance in the here and now to stay hooked. Which is again a me problem and it's absolutely fine to write your story like that. This just told me that i will now wait when a big zelda title comes out and watch how things unfold first and it makes me sad tbh. There is still this little hope that i misunderstood the trailers and it was my bad but it seems like I am not the only one who is feeling this by now.
THANKUU you've put my thoughts on totk so perfectly into words
Good video. I agree with all of this.
I got bored with it after like 9 hours and have not picked it up again, i feel the same of most of what you say but a big problem with me was the story was just not interested by it.
Just a question: If Zelda was in the past and turned herself into a dragon, shouldn’t that dragon appear in Breath of the Wild since it’s stated that she’s been flying around ever since she turned? Or did they come up with that plot point during the development of TOTK and ignored the fact that it wouldn’t make sense cause that would mean 2 master sword and, obviously, 2 Zelda’s existing at the same time?
I think the answer is they don't want you to think about it haha
Even the sky islands were up there (some people think the upheaval raised the islands but it's just poorly named). I think it's implied that there's some sort of magical cloud barrier because in BotW when you hit a dragon with your bow they go into some kinda sky portal and disappear for a bit. So it's presumed that's where zelda and the islands are. It's not explained well, and why the sky islands are falling doesn't seem to be explained either.
2 zeldas and 2 master swords existing at the same time is probably the least problematic part of this.
I never thought I'd be so disappointed in a Zelda game. But man. The longer I think about my time on TOTK the more I think "wow, I hated 87% of that experience" and man it kills me. It was so incredibly disappointing.
I was LIVING for age of calamity. And it got me so incredibly HYPED for a true sequel to BOTW. But from the moment TOTK started and they totally dumbed down the beginning journey (why weren't we allowed to have a long quest underground with Zelda like in the first trailer??? WHY) I knew I was in for something disappointing.
I really liked the great sky island. And my first few trips to the depths. The rito dungeon lead up, the boss, and the zora waterworks were all awesome. But just about every single other thing was disappointing and it hurt.
The spirit temple was something I found super early. I couldn't enter it. So my mind ran wild with what could possibly be in such an amazing dungeon. And I hoped Purah would awaken as the sage.
Nope. iPad lady, a sad excuse for a mech, and a recycled rock em sock em robots fight was all I got.
The final nail in the coffin was the absolutely abysmal ganondorf. He was so incredibly goofy. The ending and Zeldas sacrifice were awesome. But entirely soured by the rest of the game.
ALSO WHERE IS KASS
it it's any consolation, I felt the exact same way about this game, as I did with fallout 4. Could not finish either games, partly due to the mile wide inch deep approach, the complete lack of immersion with respect to events in previous titles, the lazy design and implementation of many in-game systems, and the fact that either game did not respect the time I put into it. Everything felt very surface level with no cohesion.
@@sonyman344 Amen. Couldn’t finish Fallout 4 either.
@@bardicindecision The worst thing is that both games had enormous potential, since they both had rebuilding a broken world as their main selling point. They just did nothing with it, as most of the work seems to have been put into the creative building aspects, like Fallout 4s settlement system (Which was better implemented by modders IMO), and the ultrahand-fuse aspects in Tears, alongside the physics engine. Like why are we restricted to stabilizing signs, dragging carriages and restoring a settlement to its BoTW status (Which is just a glorified fetch quest), when we could do so much more with a power like this? Like restoring outposts and settlements?!?
Like if these games end up being so shallow because of this hyperfixation on more difficult-to-implement systems, with no time to actually make the world believable, exiting and fun to roam around in, then the worlds should be smaller than they currently are. BOTWs world was expansive and empty by design, ToTK does not get to make that excuse.
Even Elden ring has a limited worldspace, that is not that big geographically, but they fill it with so much stuff and levels (If we take into consideration the underground sections and legacy dungeons) that it seems way bigger than it really is.
YIPEEE A GIRL SPEAKING ON TOTKKK
Really hope you make more videos! Youre really straightforward, good flow, nice editing, felt very immersed while listening. I have to agree on a lot of your points.
I loved botw, put in about 600 hours. I have about 300 in totk. I was okay with totks world, in terms of familarity from botw and the new depths and sky to explore. But what got me the most was the story. The old shrines, the guardians, divine beasts, certain npcs not recognizing link when i really though they would. If theres a time gap between botw and totk, and link is always 2 steps behind zelda, how does nobody remember or recognize? I totally get the new players, but i dont feel that new players would be confused by link being known by others given the clear context theres a prequel, and even in story its well referenced that link 'defeated' ganon just a couple years prior. So seems odd not many npcs remember. It frustrated me so much. Not to mention the dragon tear memories didnt have as much impact as botws memories. I felt it had lore gaps.
I really enjoyed your video and sharing your views that i feel a lot of players felt as well. ❤
22:38 The only emotion I was feeling was annoyance. The fact that the "irreversible" eating of a secret stone was whisked away by ghost magic was stupid.
While this Zelda deserves a happy ending after all the shit she's went through. I don't like the execution.
"Make the familiar compelling; not the old totally new". Well put! Less copy paste and reward/treasure recycling would be a good first step!
M🅱️🅱️🅱️🅱️🅱️F🅱️CK🅱️🅱️, THIS WAS YOUR _FIRST_ VIDEO???????????
God damn, nice work!
Just don‘t drop off like as Nintendo has.
Nice editing, nice narration; nice EVERYTHING. FFS, i have like 1000 videos up, I might have to reconsider my path here😅
Came from Skitty's video. She got my sub and you do to. Great video!
Last year, right before TOTK came out, I played through BOTW for the first time. I rushed through so I could play TOTK at the same time as everyone else, but now I really wish I’d taken my time
6:40 I literally thought we were going to get to rebuild Castle Town when I ran by the sign dude to find Hoz
For me, tears of the kingdom did feel really frustrating because it overwhelmed me. Breath of the wild was a huge game already but I had the urge to 100% it. ToTK didn't give me that feeling. All those caves, wells, sky islands. I feel like, just the depths and the sky would have cut it. If the overworld itself was more fun to explore, a rebuilt hurdle and such, it would have been satisfying enough.
Like this, I played through the dungeons, which honestly I think we're great, and went to beat the final boss (which was also epic and really satisfied me). But I don't see myself playing 3000 hours like I did in breath of the wild (I barely played 100 hours of ToTK). I don't see myself exploring beyond the sky more thoroughly, simply because I feel like it's too much to ever complete, which to me, is really unsatisfactory. That's a personal thing, though.
I think ToTK is still a great game. But for me, I want Nintendo to take a step back.
I know they do it because people always want more content, but is that really the goal? I want a game that I can truly finish and enjoy and this didn't give me it like every other Zelda game did. There is no catharsis.
The lead-in to the new areas part was great and made me realize: "TotK went to the Ubisoft school of game design!" It's the best summation of (most of) why I dislike it and maybe now that I can put it into words it will stop nagging me. It made the end of the video extremely satisfying!
It's refreshing to hear someone's opinion being similar to mine (long time Zelda gamer), who only started with BotW. I feel like TotK disrespected BotW in so many ways, it's a shame. Nintendo and Zelda team don't see it as such, because of sales numbers. Many new comers to Zelda seem to enjoy this game and they praise ultrahand to heaven and back, but what if you don't care about building things? I didn't care one bit! It's impressive they were able to pull it off on the switch and they should get all the praise for that, but I just don't care about games where I build stuff, which is why I don't enjoy games like minecraft and what not, where you can put in 100's of hours (in my opinion waste your life away) just building random stuff. And then having that mechanic and pass up the opportunity to rebuild Hyrule is insane to me... Huge disappointment.
found this in my recommended
awesome vid
Totk is a good game if you’ve never played botw
I liked your analysis. Subscribing hoping you keep making stuff.
All the interesting locations that we thought had some hidden lore or meaning that would get some attention here ended up being nothing at all. That tells me that the devs never really cared about making their world feel deep at all with a storied past to uncover. What did they even do for all those years in development?
Remember speculating about objects and locations in Ocarina? The game felt mystical and full of history despite it being for the N64. It’s part of what makes Zelda, Zelda.
Them putting in all of the outfits from BOTW and the DLC but not the Gerudo garb made me so sad. I wanna be pretty and I know Link does too. The electric, fire, ice whatever dresses are good and sexy but why have literally everything from the last game except this? It was one of my favorite things from BOTW
The more I think or reminisce on it, the more it makes me wish this Ganondorf had goals or motives like the other ones.
While not deep or heavily emphasized, The Wind Wakers version essentially implies that he was jealous of Hyrule's prosperity, meanwhile life in the dessert was marked with death. So for that reason he wanted to take over it.
He's not a character that the devs wanted to be sympathetic, since it's quite obvious he's still a malevolent dude. But giving him a motivation as simple as it can be, helps the story not feel like it's orchestrated because "evil guy wants to do evil".
Iirc, Masked Nintendo Bandit discussed an interview with Aonuma and Fujibayashi, they discussed why the Sky was so barren was because the programmers had a ton of issues with how many Sky Islands they previously wanted. May have been why the game got delayed so much.
Great video, you succinctly defined all the issues I had with the game as well. Ultimately, I think it comes down to Nintendo having a “gameplay first, everything else second” development mindset. While the game is super fun, there’s a lot of glaring flaws (story, characters, etc.) that keep it from being a masterpiece. Definitely one of the most frustrating games I’ve ever had to assess.
450th sub. Fine work. I'm always happy to watch a video that eloquently expresses how weak TOTK was as a sequel to BOTW.
Playing it for only 150 hours is so real though😭
that's almost exact amount of how many hours i've played it, you earn a sub for way too much relatability in this video.
I really like this video of yours thanks to the algorithm of our overlord. My only mild criticism is general audio seems a tad low while some segments of your video focusing on BGM will have said BGM often time louder than your voice which I find distracting.
The biggest let down in this game for me was the sky islands, it felt like there was basically no reason to explore them, and they were so sparse that it didn’t really feel like a 3rd layer of the map. I actually love the depths though, I think that they are a very cool concept. I wish they had done more with them however, I had fun exploring them, but they had so few interesting places that it got boring. I really just wish they had done more with the new layers of the map.
I'm pretty late but yeah I 100% agree.
I completely agree with you for all your points.
I’ve felt the rise of excitement when I first started the game and being quite disappointed the more I played through the story. It had so much potential to be my favourite 3D Zelda and had some good scenes, but it fell flat on it’s face when it tried to soar.
I can only hope in the next 3D entry that they take the narrative, lore, and character dialogue more seriously.
I agree with literally EVERYTHING you said
BardIndecision? More like Bad-Decision.
ok..... why was this a bad decision?
@@quinintheclouds Because you made the effort to express such a bad take. You literally wasted your life to harvest an L.
@@dannys6957 I'm not the channel owner lol, but also "bad take" isn't really constructive or informative. I don't agree with every point made 100%, but they put their thoughts and experience into words and shared it, and clearly they're not the only one given these comments. You're allowed to just... not watch things if you're going in with a closed mind
@@quinintheclouds How does it feel to be wrong?
@@dannys6957 what part of what I said was wrong?
I love that UA-cam is promoting smaller channels at the moment! Im only finding Gems ❤
I hope to find a new video of you in my Feed in the Future 🥰
Great video can’t wait for the next one
botw was my second zelda game (after minish cap) and i absolutely adored it! i'm glad i stumbled upon reviews like yours, i def won't buy totk now and wait for the next one
It’s funny too, because most things you complain about here, is something pretty much everyone was worried about before the game came UNTIL that final trailer. That final trailer showed everyone, hey, this is a narrative game with an epic story and cool side characters, including hylians all about saving hyrule. After that, EVERYONE was locked in but the game is nothing like that trailer said it would be. One of the most misleading trailers in all of gaming history imo
Furthermore, I personally feel like the cutscenes and the in world story stuff was created by 2 different teams that didn’t talk at all. Because the zonai presented in the cutscenes and the zonai presented by the constructs seem like 2 different entities to me with no cohesion between the two.
Why are there only 2 zonai? Did both of them build all of these constructs? Why did they build the constructs? Why do the constructs talk as if there are a lot of zonai, instead of just mentioning the one or both that built them? Are the zonai gods? Where did they come from? The constructs make them seem smart but all they do in cutscenes is sit around.
I just cannot fathom that after all the speculation of zonai, the archeaology people pieced together by the fandom, the introduction of this new godly powerful mysterious race was butchered so badly in a series that historically is amazing at introducing a new race, their culture, their structure, their lifestyle etc.
Yeah that trailer should count as false advertising
TOTK retroactively makes one thing about BOTW unnecessarily complicated. The Master Sword...
So, Master Sword is in the Lost Woods, awesome... But it was pulled back in time 4(?) years later by Zelda so she could let it regain power as it basked in her light energy. And we know that the BOTW/TOTK timelines work by the "it always happened" rule since Ganondorf and the Construct that gives you the Purah Pad both know who Link is...
SO IN BREATH OF THE WILD TWO MASTER SWORDS EXIST!?!?!?
I never even thought about that, bc that means there was 2 zeldas as well. And then that begs the question, where was she hiding during that game
Reason why I didn’t want time travel in a tech based Zelda.
It ain't that complicated. Yes, TOTK Zelda and the Master Sword where hiding in the sky during Botw. So what?
It's striking to me how when making BOTW, Nintendo saw fit to break nearly every tradition that OoT established for the 3D Zelda formula that many of us new so well, but when making TOTK the stuck so rigidly to the BOTW formula that, if it weren't for Ultrahand, the two games would be indistinguishable from each other. It makes me worry that Nintendo didn't actually learn anything from BOTW's development and that the series will just get stuck in the same rut it was in after OoT, where every subsequent game is identical to the first one gameplay-wise. The difference being that at least with the old formula, there was room to tell interesting stories, a quality that the new formula is seemingly allergic to. I hate to say it, but if the next 3D Zelda is revealed and it's just the same as the last two, I might just swear off of 3D Zelda for a while.
Shigeru Miyamoto is the one who doesn’t want story in Nintendo games
Pretty much agree with most of this. Have you played “old” Zelda before?
I've only watched people play games pre skyward sword. I do plan to play eventually though, feels like a must!