Thanks to MANSCAPED for sponsoring today's video! Get a special edition of The Lawn Mower 5.0 Ultra White for 20% OFF + Free Shipping with promo code “LINKUS7” at manscaped.com/linkus7 ! This was such a interesting video to make, made me realize how much I missed certain features from BoTW, but it also gave me a newfound appreciation for ToTK. ENJOY!!!
In the same vein as "the memories shouldnt be able to be gotten in any order", they really needed to do something for the post-dungeon cutscenes in TOTK. It was literally the exact same scene 4 times with a different narrator. They could have made it be some sort of progressive story, or maybe each of the scenes had some key detail that the others didnt so that once you saw all of them you learned something new
The story progression/cutscene programming for TotK was just flat out lazy. Like they spent so much time working on the individual game systems that they completely forgot how to program story reveals that don't completely break sequence and/or repeat the exact same sequence multiple times.
One thing I never see people talk about is that TotK sort of canonized a lot of the glitches in BotW. You didn't show it here, but there is a whole category of glitches in BotW that involve overloading your menu, resulting in the ability to combine weapons together. And then we got fusion in Totk. BotW had wind bombing, TotK has bomb shield launching. BotW had "flying machines" via magnesis, TotK has true vehicles. BotW had out of bounds clips, TotK . . . still has those, but it also has Ascend.
15:20 Another way that they could bring back more traditional Zelda dungeon design is by tying Rune upgrades to a specific dungeon, and make the Rune upgrade more interesting than just lowering the cooldown like most of them are. The Bomb Rune could gain functionality that works like a Bombchu, running along surfaces. Stasis gains the Recall function. Stuff like that. It would make it so that the tools you start the game with are given significant functionality upgrades later down the line, and allow dungeons to be more like traditional Zelda dungeons.
i totally get what you mean about the new champions following you around in totk and agree that it can be annoying at times but i also kinda liked the contrast - botw made you feel intentionally lonely, because you’ve just woken up alone in this post-calamity world which is seemingly deserted until you travel far enough to find one of the few remaining towns; whereas a contrasting theme in totk is hyrule’s sense of community returning - link runs into more people in the overworld, things are being rebuilt, and more direct teamwork is required to beat the dungeons. personally i liked feeling a little less lonely playing totk & i think the champion sprites physically Being there with you whenever you summon them was a nice touch:’) although i will say accidentally triggering tulin’s wind when trying to use yunobo’s power or some shit every time made me wanna scream sometimes lmfao😭 i feel like they maybeeee couldve gone about it a better way bc it def feels kinda messy unless you only have one out at a time
This. The sage spirits in Tears of the Kingdom, while annoying, fit very well with the less lonely vibe of the game. Finally I see someone pointing that out.
I like tears, but breath of the wild just has a different feeling. I’ve replayed breath of my wild so many times, but only replayed tears once. edit: I had my notifications off this whole time bro, when did i become famous!!!1
SAME! TotK is overwhelming with details and a lot of parts feel very repetitive. Sure I loved the sky and diving, but BotW has more magic, a more worked ambiance.
@@EtheRenardThere just weren’t enough sky islands, like I was expecting it to be a big part of the game, but instead it was mainly just like the tutorial and then smaller islands. I guess the temples kind of count?
@@whackareal but the depths were also semi lackluster, unless we had more dynamic locations like under Death Mountain, it's pretty much seen once-seen it all.
I’m now playing master mode for the first time and playing breath of the wild in 2024 is just reminding me on how this was my first Zelda game and it just made me attached to the Zelda franchise as a whole. It’s truly a memory of how I loved this game. But also keep up the good work linkus. Have a amazing day.
That's my opinion too. Had ToTK been first it would've been even more incredible but BoTW was more climactic since it was first. That initial 20 hours was better than anything in ToTK. Just like OOT held the win for me until BoTW because it was the first 3D Zelda which was incredible at the time. To top BoTW, for me, I'm not gonna need a VR Zelda with the ability to play in 1st person BUT NOT a requirement. 😊 Can you imagine the battles in VR 1st person mode? 😮
BOTW made me feel child-like wonder that i hadn't experienced in games for so long, i bought it without seeing any trailers or gameplay and i was awe-struck with the scale of it, it's such a special game still. Idk if it's because of that first experience but i do think it feels like a more cohesive experience than TOTK
Absolutely loved this retrospective! I completely agree with all your points! There are really strengths and weaknesses to both games, but at the end of the day they’re both masterpieces! When I think about my experience of exploring BOTW’s world for the first time, nothing can quite compare to that feeling.
Here's something: This game is literally older than my younger sister, and she has more hours than me in it. And i used to kinda speedrun this game. I still cant come to terms with how old this game has gotten. Like, 7 YEARS ago still FEELS like 2013, but it was 2017. Which is so wierd to think about.
Yeah, tell me about it. I'm 44 and can't believe this game is over 7 years old. When it came out my wife and I had been married for not quite 6 years, and now we just celebrated our 13th anniversary. I still haven't even finished my first playthrough, though I'm 100+ hours into my second profile.
LOL, My older brother bought BOTW for himself and after spending maybe 30 hours, he beat it and passed it to me. I easily reached 400 hours before beating it LMFAO.
@@ShaunRF I had that exact feeling walking my dog the other day, one of the older ladies down the street has a dog that we ran into on the path and hearing her say her dog was 13 (I met her when she was a brand new puppy) and made me have an existential crisis in the middle of the trail LOL
I have a feeling you made a lot of folks very excited when they realized they knew the trick for the shrine where you flip the maze when the professional Zelda speedrunner did not know it. Very fun retrospective!
I remember playing this as my first Zelda game! It was such a good experience, this game is peak Especially the guardians, such great music and terrifying opponents
Just play all of them, ocarina of time, majoras mask, wind waker, twilight princess, link to the past, minish cap, oracle of ages/seasons, do not play Zelda 2. Zelda 2 is the worst one.
20:33 That's because BoTW's scaling scales off enemy kills, with bigger enemies giving more points ( the Blights give the most, iirc ), so a speedrun doesn't really let it scale
So does TotK's, the fundamental way the enemy scaling systems work are virtually the same. However in TotK you also get "bonus points" for things like headshots, flurry rushes, or killing the enemy damageless.
I enjoyed looking for Zelda for most of ToTK and then immediately realizing that the white dragon was Zelda when you are pulling out the restored master sword. I also loved being launched out of the tower and surveying the area because it showed that the world truly changed from everything that BoTW was. Link was the only one capable of surveying the land, sky and depths
Another interesting point I learned from a video I watched a while back is how Breath of the Wild's barren world still encourages exploration. How, you ask? Through the use of triangular landscapes, like hills. There’s always a hill that obscures your view in some way, forcing you to scale it to reach your destination. This design keeps the player engaged by creating a constant need to see more of the landscape, even when it seems empty.
I love Tears, especially ultrahand and zonai devices, but Breath is just special to me. Just like all the other Zeldas I will come back to it every once in a while.
Personally, I got burned out on TotK. There were sooooo many fetch quests, so many things to collect. I stopped in the middle of upgrading my batteries, because running around the Depth was so boring, with everything looking the same, and every single monster group contained at least one silver monster, which aren't exactly hard to kill, but annoying as hell. There are all these cool combat tricks, but you end up rotating your great weapon every time, because it's the only way to deal the necessary damage in a reasonable time. And as someone who loved exploring the world more than anything else in BotW, Hyrule felt empty to me in TotK. The overworld was too familiar, despite the small tweaks, the sky islands few and far in number, and most didn't offer more than a korok puzzle. The depth had cool corners, but most of it felt incredibly samey, and like I said, where I spent more than 400 hours exploring BotW, I never even got to the final fight in TotK because I was getting bored doing all the collect quests halfway through...
10:20 While I do get what you're saying, Breath of the Wild's world was purposely left barren, often seeming lonely and quiet. it's a post apocalypse world after all, they lost the war against Ganon and Hyrule is broken. If you put that against Tears of the kingdom however, Hryule is healing. Settlements and stables are springing up, the races are leaving their own regions to visit more of the others. An important distinction, one I think Nintendo managed pretty well.
There's one issue I've always had with the talks of "Open Air VS Old School" WHY can't we have gadgets that we get from the dungeons? Sure, it makes it a LITTLE less "open-world" but realistically just make it any order before the final boss and it's good. Now, for something as game changing and widely used as Fuse I understand giving it to you from the bat to toy with and learn it's limitations, but can you imagine if, say, there were seven dungeons in a "Breath of the Wild 3" each one housing a different Gadger? Cryonis, Bombs, Rewind, Ascend, Fuse, Ultrahand, an upgraded Magnesis where you can give objects a magnetic charge. And EACH of those dungeons were DESIGNED to give you that toy, teach you how to use it, and THEN, for the boss fight; TEACH YOU HOW TO BREAK IT. You CAN have your cake and eat it too. Heck, do it how old zeldas did it; you get the gadget about 1/3rd of the way through the dungeon, but your "real reward" is for beating the boss, this way, it remains open world (Grab the gadget and come back later if you want) AND opens a door for a real interesting way to set up a Speed run "Okay, so we're going to start this dungeon for Cryonis for later, but we don't actually need the item you get for beating the boss, so we won't be returning" (To be clear; I actually love the Open Air games, they feel like a sandbox rpg, even more so in Tears, which I LOVE, but I understand how they can still improve using lessons from their past.
What you described is exactly what the game tries to do. You get your tools from the "Tutorial" island you don't have to leave it, you can just get the perks and mess about with them for ages before actually doing the quest to leave. I do like the idea though about getting perks from boss dungeons like the Zelda games of old. But can you imagine the youth of today with the old skool style of tutorials, where you wonder about just trying to figure things out.... They wouldn't have the attention span. Heck OoT when that was first released, boggled my brain. I got through it in the end with a little help from Nintendo magazine Zelda guides each month, I like the way they've gone with the last 2 games myself. It lets a lot of the newer generation enjoy something I've been playing since the early 90's.... Could definitely do with some tweaking though in parts, more difficulty 😁
@@oddpoppetesq.3467well about the attention span thing. Maybe playing a Zelda game that requires more attention would help them? making them more able to focus.
20:20 I'm not sure what you mean by this because in terms of how the scaling works, BotW and TotK are mostly the same. You get "points" from killing enemies, weighted depending on the enemy's strength, and then specific enemies and weapons scale up at certain thresholds. Those Bokoblins were still red because some enemies have scaling off. The only thing TotK changed about this was that there are more ways to get points from flurry rushes, headshots, and damageless kills.
I remember getting the Master Sword before doing any of the dungeons, then doing the Gerudo dungeon first, not realizing that was the hardest dungeon/boss of the 4 Divine Beasts~~~
I feel like TotK is to BotW, as Majora's Mask is to OoT. different, weird, darker, a lot of folks will prefer one to the other. And I think they both partner eachother so so well. I felt not the same wave of emotion from starting BotW as I did when the music started building and going deeper underground in TotK, but sheer excitement as the mood was set. They're an amazing pair of games.
I disagree with this, majoras mask changes worlds, has new time travel mechanics and the best side quests and mood of the zelda series. Tears of the kingdom doesn't really build on botw except for its new mechanics
Honestly I've found myself coming back to Botw because of how much fun the glitches & guardians are. I just learned how to do the early master cycle at the beginning of the game inventory slot transfer & weapon modifier corruption are also fun glitches
I think the paraglider in tear's is linked to the skyview tower, which i therefore dont mind that they moved the glider for that purpose. Love your vids mate
I thought the same, in TotK you gain the paraglider to let you use the SkyView tower without dying on the ground. I'm currently playing TotK a second time without paraglider and discovered you can't unlock any SkyView tower without getting the paraglider with Purah first. That's mean, no map and the surface is just a blue screen with a lot of points
@@pedrovictorsilvaladeira7877 Which is why BOTW was designed better. You unlock the Towers as one of your first actions in the tutorial, wheres in TOTK you unlock it relatively way later and as a result it makes the beginning part of the game feel like a slog of needing to do way more "tutorials" until you actually unlock the ability to do what you want, which is especially bad for a game that marketed itself as a sequel. Once you do the Great Plateau, you can do whatever you want. Once you complete the Great Sky Island, you need to go to Lookout Landing first, then you need to talk to Purah, then you need to get some exposition about several things you _just_ learned, then you need to go to the castle to speak to some nobody NPCs that watch Not-Zelda disappear, then you go back to Lookout Landing and talk to Purah again, then you visit the Emergency Shelter and talk to even more NPCs, then you talk to Purah again at the foot of the Tower, then finally get your Paraglider and unlock the ability to activate Towers. It's tedious, and makes replaying the game feel awful.
Botw’s items are all useful in his inventory he has guardian parts (can be use for akkala ancient tech lab to buy op weapons) apples (horses and koroks) shrooms and a fleet loutus seed (cooking for more hearts and special effects)(including rock salt) one cricket a few boko parts and keese parts (for cooking elixirs and selling for money ) (depends on rarity)
My biggest issue with totk is that the framerate is really bad. It doesn't make sense that they added monster raids and a building feature when the console clearly can't handle it and you'll be playing with 10 fps once there are just a few too many parts or npcs on screen.
I played through TOTK first and then tried BOTW. Without glitches, I think TOTK just has so many nice traversal tools with zonai devices compared to BOTW where the only thing you use is walking or horse riding. Playing BOTW without knowing glitches, it just feels like you have to walk everywhere and there's no alternative. I guess that can be a good thing too cause the moment you realize you can make a flying machine, there's no real exploration you need to do anymore, you can just fly everywhere
I played BotW first and then TotK and of course, loved both. In February I started replaying BotW on master mode, and it is such a masterpiece. Traversal never seemed like a problem because you have those options that you could get really good at. And glitches are fun :3 also nostalgia for me so I understand why you think that
@@haobo_zhang horses and the master cycle and fast travel are it. I think that those options were enough for BotW because it never felt like a hassle to use a horse or pull out the master cycle it felt really fun. You are right though options are definitely limited
@@jwechols86 I guess thats my experience playing BOTW after, everything felt very slow in comparison, like there are no options to climb a mountain besides just climbing and maybe Revali, while there's so many different methods in TOTK.
Imo shrines in Botw are 10 times better than Totk. Way more complex and challenging, while a lot of totk’s shrines are just tutorials for Zonai devices or Rauru’s blessing.
I think I've figured out why I prefer the old runes over Ultrahand: Ultra is much more on player creativity, offering limited tools for us to combine into whatever function we can mechanically build. But that's the thing; Ascend is simple enough so it's probably my favorite, and Fuse is kinda the gray area, but the others are more obscure and too specific, especially building. I need to think about weight, the distribution, the fuse limit, battery drain, not accidentally killing Link with it, and other stuff I can't remember because it's been over a year probably. Not saying it isn't fun, but what in the world, I'm not an engineer :( And the time reverse is really cool and interesting, but I think it suffers one major factor. At least with building, a lot of it is grounded in real knowledge. It's so hard for me to remember that I can recall time because I never think about it elsewhere, and its use is so stinking specific that nothing else reminds me of it. And yes, some people have found creative uses, but I just cant get the same value out of it, so the whole ability is kind of a flop for me. (And just to get it out, Autobuild needs more Favorite slots. Don't encourage me to experiment with custom ideas and then not offer enough room to save them! I stopped trying new things because I filled all the slots already and I dont want to have to try to rebuild everything from memory. I'm stupid and I'm not gonna pretend I can remember everything!) The runes were simple. Throw boom. Stop objects and monsters. (I remembered this because freezing monsters is very powerful... and kinda funny) Move metal things. Make ice block. These are much easier to understand and use! They dont overtake your adventure, they're small tools to help you. They're borderline not even really required to understand either. I'm not saying creativity is bad by any means, but maybe they're cutting away players by the amount of complexity they're demanding the use of. ...And dont get me started on the Sage abilities- I'm still confused by how people say BotW is "the beta form" of TotK. Neither is perfect, but one makes sure you get the paraglider, and the other - despite its entire point being verticality - lets you get sidetracked and miss it. As well as make menus annoying by making every tab a single page. And now I need to spend limited resources (unless I dupe stuff, which they desperately patch out to pad the play time) to match Ravioli's Gale. Why'd the bird tornado have to leave?! Ah!
Yeah BOTW was just more focused and simple, every design decision and tradeoff made sense for that direction. TOTK has great ideas and lots of fun moments, but got a bit lost in its ambitions.
As someone who tends to not enjoy speed running I think you hit the nail on the head about why I enjoyed tears of the kingdom better. I don't even like to glitch games to play.
I find it hilarious that the same button press you'd use to throw your item for a fall damage cancel in BOTW makes you face plant into the ground in TOTK, I wonder if that was on purpose
I have on purpose not watched any of your TOTK videos cuz I don't wanna spoil the entire game for me so thx for this video that I can actually watch :)
Ngl. Both hit extremly different for me. The ground travel was fun and to me, i always just enjoy exploring. Its that same cozy feeling of playing skyrim, just not as scary until the guadian gloom music plays for both games. Its that first awe. Its the fucking around and finding out. I played it so much in early high school which helped a lot mentally. I think they both have their unique features that are suited for different people, theres a resoudcfulness and a feeling of post apocoleptic feel to it. Scrounging by, toughinf it out and such. And totk has a fun creativness with the fuse system. Its such a genius mechanic. And also just for me personally, i got totk on mothers day last year. It was in my life in a very important time as i had so much drama happening and my depression was an all time low. And now i listen to the sound tracks for the games to really help me. Ive never been too big into Legend of Zelda but i love videos on it, the sound track in all of the games are beyond amazing. And i still would absolutly kill for a port of wind waker on switch as i wanted so badly to play games such as wind waker and splatoon on the Wii U but they came out right after my parents sold it. And honestly, i still regret being okay with selling it cus i have a lot of fond memories with the wii U.
For me what made exploration so much better in BotW was that it was more difficult for a casual player. You needed to get gear/stamina/hearts to get to places, or climb hights. God damn how I searched for the climbing set just to explore better. The reward in a game about exploring was to explore better. In Totk you build a hover bike and then you just went wherever you wanted almost immediately. Completely destroyed the reward system
Best way to fix the dungeons in totk is only make some select walls climbable, have more of a linear structure with the boss lair having a key to get into, bring back small keys, items should be either abilities or sage abilities
A way to fix the open world dungeons could be for them to cantered around obtaining runes. Sure it would restrict the world a little bit, but it could prevent the typical terminals problem and also give you incentive to plan which dungeon you want to do first by what power you want.
One thing I miss in Breath of the wild is being able to enter the dungeons after you beat them. Since these are some of the coolest looking dungeons on the outside.
You can also use the Master Cycle and horses for wind bombing, which makes it easier. I know the Master Cycle is an end-game item, but it can really help if you want to get around the map faster.
I personally have no beef with the movement of the paraglider to Lookout Landing, as it reinforces what you know that you can fall from any height and land in water. It also makes for a good challenge run where you can choose not to get the paraglider, where in The Breath of the Wild, it is forced upon you.
i also think the paraglider thing in totk is so you dont exploit it in the great sky isle. i think not having it makes you engage with the mechanics of the game more, because theres deff some chests you can get to by gliding rather than the intended ultra hand to grab the chest or move the platforms around. using the arise spell and such.. or whatever its called where you can go up thru ceilings.
I havent even finished totk, played it for a few hours the week it came out then didnt feel the drive to continue yet. I did already play botw for over 200 hours so im sure that was a big part of the burn out. Im playing skyward sword HD and its a great “breath” of fresh air
I may be one of the rare people owning the WiiU version of the game, physical release bought at launch lol I remember having cheesed the marble motion control thing with the WiiU gamepad too, I was also surprised to see this was so easy, it had to be an intentional way to let the player do it when the gamepad was flipped upside down, else it was super silly to have missed this exploit somehow.
For open world dungeons going forward they should make players get upgraded versions in the dungeon. This way the dungeon can be built around the item and the upgrade. Lets take the Stasis Rune, it stops time, But doing a certain dungeon gets the upgrade version, The Rewind Rune, Which not only stops time but rewind it too. Another could be giving you the Hookshot early, BUT in one of the dungeons is the upgraded version the Clawshot, allowing you hookshot while on things to get around easier.
i keep thinking of an old movement glitch that used to be popular, and VERY easy to do: -find a large metal object. -push any other large object on top of it. -stand on top of the upper object. -use the Magnet ability on the metal object. as i said, VERY easy to do, but much slower than that "bomb wiggle" glitch.
10:45 I would totally be down for a tour guide of Hyrule where you're just floating above the land, not necessarily super fast, more like it's a fly-over.
@@fourthknower9831 they could have easily fixed it by letting us keep some fused arrows in our arsenal instead of making us fuse one arrow at a time, it's sooo annoying
im back in my tears of the kingdom era, on my like….3rd playthrough?? i do love it, and i love botw too ofc. i do really like how totk has more shrine replayability because there’s so many different solutions to most of them.
Breath of the wild, 100 procentaged on normal mode. Decided that wasnt good enough, 100 procented on master mode as well. Close to a thousand hours in it and still counting. Tears of the kingdom 1 playthrough, no 100%. I like tears of the kingdom, but it just didnt captivate me the same way.
@@NielsGx Yeah I get what you mean and sure thats absolutely part of it. But, there are other elements to it as well. At least for my experience. I found the Characters and the storie dumb, childish, poorly executed and just silly. BOTW already had some issues here, but it still had some charm, some very beautifull and touching moments and I felt they mangede to cater to both an adult audience and a younger one with relative succes. TOTK and its main characters, cut scenes etc is a serious downgrade and I dont wanna see any of it again. BOTW actually had me restarting from scratch a couple of time. BOTW has some issues no doubt. TOTK just made them worse. But TOTK has some very strong gameplay as well, with the abilities and freedom to create being some of the best.
Im actually on my first playthrough of totk and the 2nd memory i watched was the last zelda/mastersword one.. i was so confused and spoiled so i agree it shouldn't have been fixed locations. Also the motion control in botw made me exit shrines when ever i saw it had one, I'm glad its not in totk
I REALLY hated the motion control puzzles in Breath of the Wild. Forced motion controls should _never_ be a thing. They aren't fun. They are an accessibility issue. And if you don't have access to a controller with motion controls you're just screwed. I remember a few years back the motion controls in my joy cons were broken, essentially the joystick drift but for motion controls, so if you didn't move the controller at all it would just _spin._ And non of my wired pro controllers had motion control. In order to beat those puzzles I _had_ to contend with the broken joy cons, and fight with the motion controls the whole time.
25:30 I loved that shrine it was super hard in the buiging because of that those gaurdian and I still rember getting that edge of duality from the chest seating 50 and thinks it was so good
11:15 I think it would have been good if the memories appeared in the order they should have been viewed because the geoglyph does correlate to what the memories show. It would have been weird if you go to the geoglyph that has the dagger and the memory is about Zelda arriving in the past.
BotW dungeons were pretty cool (i haven't played TotK) although the fact they use the exact same visual does make them blend in people's mind. it's the shrines who got a bit redundant especially when there are 120 of them (although a fair bit of them were overworld challenges leading to a free shrine these were some of the more interesting) but when you have to do several times the "beat the guardian" challenge or the "put the balls in the right receptacles" challenge it's not exactly a thrilling experience.
one way they could make dungeons better is to make it more like a metroidvania, you get the items in the dungeons, but the other dungeons have secrets and stuff for the other items too including fun shortcuts
Ngl, I liked Totk, but frankly Botw just had more charm with how dynamic the world felt as you progressed. Sure the dungeons were meh but the world is fantastic.
I casually learned how to clip through walls to beat the sword trial because I died to something I felt was unfair in the second to last room XD It was fascinating to traverse that area out of bounds. Felt more rewarding than doing it normally especially after I already did 99% of it normally and still had to defeat the boss.
When i first played botw, i went straight to the gerudos, because my wife loves them and after beating the beast i Was very dissapointed to find out, that every other boss fight was the same and much less interesting to fight. And even if i love botw, totk is much more superior in my view. But u gotta point in the Power ups u are getting. Imo botw did it better, then having all of the ghosts with u all the time. But besides that great Video as always linkus and keep up the good work
TotK is a great game and all, but BotW just had that special something that TotK was missing. I think your comments on the opening cutscenes sums it up pretty well. And I wholeheartedly agree with needing the sages to be out to use the abilities in TotK being a massive pain. Though, I will say that I wish Revali's Gale was less clunky to use. Between needing to basically stop moving and only having 3 uses before a several minute long cooldown, which doesn't start rolling until all 3 uses are gone, I never liked it much. Especially compared to Ascend, Gale just feels a lot more limited, even considering the extra freedom of being able use it to some effect virtually anywhere vs only with something above you.
I love both games dearly. They are so different yet so similar. Kind of fascinating. What drives me crazy about TotK is how useless the sage abilities are in real combat. Talking to random walking NPCs is the worst. Especially since D-Pad down is completely free to bind to another wheel for you to select the ability you want. Also being able to send back or pull out sages with this imaginary D-Pad Down wheel would be so much better... By trying to remove menu clutter they ironically added menu clutter. Both games have weaknesses but both can suck you in and get you invested so heavily... masterpieces.
Totk is almost considered mediocre because they literally left the same map (which completely removes the point of exploration if you have already explored the map in the previous one). They showed sky islands so much in the trailer/teasers making people think it would be huge or super awesome but were so small and unrewarding THE BEST SKY ISLAND IS LITERALLY THE TUTORIAL PLACE. The depths were actually pretty good.
I remember almost nothing about the divine beast dungeons, lol. They just felt like chores that I had to get over with, so I could get back to exploring the world.
I LOVE Tears of the Kingdom, but Breath of the Wild will always have a special place in my heart. Since the release of Breath of the Wild, I hit puberty, lost family members, moved to 3 different houses, made a life-long friend that I talk to every day, and started my senior year of high school, and Breath of the Wild was a retreat to something familiar through all of that. I've gone from the innocent little kid I once was to a maturing guy whose stuck in life's fast lane.. I've spent hundreds of hours in Breath of the Wild, replaying it, speedrunning, exploring, getting Korok seeds (still haven't gotten quite all of them yet! 😂), listening to the Hateno Village and Gerudo town themes, and so much more. The ending of the Champion's Ballad had me in tears, and I still find new areas to explore. Tears of the Kingdom was a real treat, and with over 2 hundred hours of play time, it's definitely a top 5 game for me, but Breath of the Wild just has so much more significance in my personal life. That, and I like BOTW's ambient music for exploring the regular overworld better than TOTK's! 😁
In my mind what puts totk below botw is that u can do infinite playthroughs of botw and find a new way to enjoy it where totk is a little more stale for repeat playthroughs
I think the nonlinearity that I would want from these open world games that I think would solve my problems with these new dungeons is if they did the dungeon/equipment system from Link Between Worlds. All of the dungeons are open to complete in any order but centered around a specific item, but all of the items are available to rent/buy from the beginning.
18:08 i did naboris first got stuck for an hour bc i didn't understand the 2nd phase then looked it up and that was the first time i had a zelda experiance using something you got a long time ago
I like the way tears did dungeons better. It was a great way to show homage to older games with the build up to dungeons. Creating a story for them and the journey to get in. FYI, I'm not a speedrunner, just sharing my opinion
I'm not all the way through the video but I do want to make a note here: the memories in totk are annoying if you get them out of order, but if they were going to force them to be played in a specific order then it might not work to have all 10 spots available at once and just play them in order because the locations of the tears are tied to the memory that comes with them. I like it could be better to have them be similar to other quests where each one becomes available as you collect the previous one. Like some sort of "oh! there's tell of a new geoglyph in xyz region! link we should go investigate." That way you could unlock the memories in order without losing the very specific locations. Or! potentially there could be something that you get when you pick up the geoglyphs quest that tells you the order (rather than/alongside the forgotten temple room which I think has them in order on the wall but I am unsure, i havent looked into that very closely) The dungeon leadup in totk is definitely so So long. I'm doing a third full playthrough and it genuinely took me over an hour to do dragonhead islands yesterday, to the point I didnt even want to actually do the spirit temple after. The leadup to, for example, the wind temple ended up taking me 2 sessions, and then I did the actual temple on a third session. I prefer the actual totk dungeons though, the ones in botw are puzzley in a way that makes me just want to get them over with so I end up looking up a guide instead of trying to figure out/remember how to do the puzzles Watching the gerudo dungeon reminded me of another point. I thought I would miss elemental arrows but tbh? I don't really. I like being able to choose if I need to tie an elemental thing to an arrow or save my arrows/bow durability and just chuck it (I do electrocute and explode myself a lot but it is what it is lol) I do miss stasis momentum building (looking at that golf shrine lol) but I do agree that recall is a much better version of stasis haha
Yeah everyone does it differently! i personally do it much more personally I tilt the ball through the maze all the way over to the chest and leave the final path in the maze at a downwards slant then enter the maze and push the ball into the right position and stasis it and launch it towards its destination like I said it’s a much more upfront and personal way to do it.
I think I like TotK shrines more if only because it was so much easier to find all of them thanks to their lightroot counterparts in the Depths. Made it do much easier to seek them out.
I feel that had TotK come out before BotW, and BotW released as a prequel game, then TotK would have been seen as the better game. This is because the whole "open world Zelda" format would have been given to us on the larger game first, so we would have seen it as better in every way by the time BotW, a smaller game, released. They gave us the format in BotW first and that's why it FEELS better than TotK - when in actuality it's not. But that's just my opinion.
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This was such a interesting video to make, made me realize how much I missed certain features from BoTW, but it also gave me a newfound appreciation for ToTK. ENJOY!!!
hey linkus im a fan of that it gives me nostalgia
I'm first here. LOL. Linkus7 can you play a sonic game called sonic unleashed. Trust me it's fun.
@@M.c-r5d My favorite sonic game, I might start making mod videos on it since i just figured out how to mod it!
@@ztwslayernice. I wish I could get mods. But I'm seriously grinding sonic unleashed that much I turned sonic into one punch man. (LITERALLY 🗿🗿🗿)
I'm able to one hit a titan with a single punch. The fact that Ive done this is mak me realise I might play games to much.💀💀💀💀
In the same vein as "the memories shouldnt be able to be gotten in any order", they really needed to do something for the post-dungeon cutscenes in TOTK. It was literally the exact same scene 4 times with a different narrator. They could have made it be some sort of progressive story, or maybe each of the scenes had some key detail that the others didnt so that once you saw all of them you learned something new
“Demon king? Secret stone?”
The story progression/cutscene programming for TotK was just flat out lazy. Like they spent so much time working on the individual game systems that they completely forgot how to program story reveals that don't completely break sequence and/or repeat the exact same sequence multiple times.
thats how i thought it would be when i did the first dungeon or two but by the last couple i was just making fun of the repeated dialogue lol
And the depths in tears was a bit of a waste too
@@kateobrien9916 psycho mantis?
One thing I never see people talk about is that TotK sort of canonized a lot of the glitches in BotW. You didn't show it here, but there is a whole category of glitches in BotW that involve overloading your menu, resulting in the ability to combine weapons together. And then we got fusion in Totk. BotW had wind bombing, TotK has bomb shield launching. BotW had "flying machines" via magnesis, TotK has true vehicles. BotW had out of bounds clips, TotK . . . still has those, but it also has Ascend.
Litteraly "It's not a bug, it's a feature"
To be fair, the devs themselves talked a lot about this aspect of TotK's development.
Botw was a great game, TotK was not.
@@JohnHunterPlayerr Could be the worst Zelda game in the franchise. Might even be one of the worst games of all time.
@@General12th tweakers be like:
15:20 Another way that they could bring back more traditional Zelda dungeon design is by tying Rune upgrades to a specific dungeon, and make the Rune upgrade more interesting than just lowering the cooldown like most of them are. The Bomb Rune could gain functionality that works like a Bombchu, running along surfaces. Stasis gains the Recall function. Stuff like that. It would make it so that the tools you start the game with are given significant functionality upgrades later down the line, and allow dungeons to be more like traditional Zelda dungeons.
i totally get what you mean about the new champions following you around in totk and agree that it can be annoying at times but i also kinda liked the contrast - botw made you feel intentionally lonely, because you’ve just woken up alone in this post-calamity world which is seemingly deserted until you travel far enough to find one of the few remaining towns; whereas a contrasting theme in totk is hyrule’s sense of community returning - link runs into more people in the overworld, things are being rebuilt, and more direct teamwork is required to beat the dungeons. personally i liked feeling a little less lonely playing totk & i think the champion sprites physically Being there with you whenever you summon them was a nice touch:’) although i will say accidentally triggering tulin’s wind when trying to use yunobo’s power or some shit every time made me wanna scream sometimes lmfao😭 i feel like they maybeeee couldve gone about it a better way bc it def feels kinda messy unless you only have one out at a time
you can turn off specific spirits in the key items menu i'm pretty sure
@@zombiegod34they mentioned that in their comment.
@@thewukongianvessel4060 honestly it's quite long so i'm not surprised if i missed it
This. The sage spirits in Tears of the Kingdom, while annoying, fit very well with the less lonely vibe of the game. Finally I see someone pointing that out.
i think they shoulda just added a trigger prompt.. like having you hold down the L button or something while pressing A to activate an ability.
I like tears, but breath of the wild just has a different feeling. I’ve replayed breath of my wild so many times, but only replayed tears once.
edit: I had my notifications off this whole time bro, when did i become famous!!!1
SAME! TotK is overwhelming with details and a lot of parts feel very repetitive. Sure I loved the sky and diving, but BotW has more magic, a more worked ambiance.
@@EtheRenardThere just weren’t enough sky islands, like I was expecting it to be a big part of the game, but instead it was mainly just like the tutorial and then smaller islands. I guess the temples kind of count?
@@tippedjoshua6802yeah, they hyped up the sky so much and then the depths were way cooler
@@whackareal but the depths were also semi lackluster, unless we had more dynamic locations like under Death Mountain, it's pretty much seen once-seen it all.
exactly how I'm feeling
I’m now playing master mode for the first time and playing breath of the wild in 2024 is just reminding me on how this was my first Zelda game and it just made me attached to the Zelda franchise as a whole. It’s truly a memory of how I loved this game. But also keep up the good work linkus. Have a amazing day.
Im playing master mode in BOTW too! Im honestly just doing it to feel the nostalgia.
I’m trying to 100% the game and so far I got 3 divine beasts
Same❤
Playing on master mode for the first time but I am also *not* using the warp function.
Great way to appreciate the map.
The thing about BoTW is it was new and exciting. We’d never had something like that I love ToTK but nothing compares to exploring for the first time.
That's my opinion too. Had ToTK been first it would've been even more incredible but BoTW was more climactic since it was first. That initial 20 hours was better than anything in ToTK.
Just like OOT held the win for me until BoTW because it was the first 3D Zelda which was incredible at the time. To top BoTW, for me, I'm not gonna need a VR Zelda with the ability to play in 1st person BUT NOT a requirement. 😊
Can you imagine the battles in VR 1st person mode? 😮
BOTW made me feel child-like wonder that i hadn't experienced in games for so long, i bought it without seeing any trailers or gameplay and i was awe-struck with the scale of it, it's such a special game still. Idk if it's because of that first experience but i do think it feels like a more cohesive experience than TOTK
Absolutely loved this retrospective! I completely agree with all your points! There are really strengths and weaknesses to both games, but at the end of the day they’re both masterpieces! When I think about my experience of exploring BOTW’s world for the first time, nothing can quite compare to that feeling.
Here's something: This game is literally older than my younger sister, and she has more hours than me in it. And i used to kinda speedrun this game. I still cant come to terms with how old this game has gotten. Like, 7 YEARS ago still FEELS like 2013, but it was 2017. Which is so wierd to think about.
Yeah, tell me about it. I'm 44 and can't believe this game is over 7 years old. When it came out my wife and I had been married for not quite 6 years, and now we just celebrated our 13th anniversary. I still haven't even finished my first playthrough, though I'm 100+ hours into my second profile.
LOL, My older brother bought BOTW for himself and after spending maybe 30 hours, he beat it and passed it to me. I easily reached 400 hours before beating it LMFAO.
This feeling is something that only gets worse as you get older lol. Its one of the running jokes among those of us in our middle aged years.
@@ShaunRF I had that exact feeling walking my dog the other day, one of the older ladies down the street has a dog that we ran into on the path and hearing her say her dog was 13 (I met her when she was a brand new puppy) and made me have an existential crisis in the middle of the trail LOL
I have a feeling you made a lot of folks very excited when they realized they knew the trick for the shrine where you flip the maze when the professional Zelda speedrunner did not know it.
Very fun retrospective!
I remember playing this as my first Zelda game! It was such a good experience, this game is peak
Especially the guardians, such great music and terrifying opponents
If you haven’t yet play twilight princess!!!! By far the best Zelda game I’ve ever played
If you haven’t played ocarina of time, DO IT! It’s by far the best Zelda game. Link’s awakening is amazing too!
Just play all of them, ocarina of time, majoras mask, wind waker, twilight princess, link to the past, minish cap, oracle of ages/seasons, do not play Zelda 2. Zelda 2 is the worst one.
@@RedCyberLizziecdi games exist tho 💀
@@ZelLink1 I said what I said.
20:33 That's because BoTW's scaling scales off enemy kills, with bigger enemies giving more points ( the Blights give the most, iirc ), so a speedrun doesn't really let it scale
So does TotK's, the fundamental way the enemy scaling systems work are virtually the same. However in TotK you also get "bonus points" for things like headshots, flurry rushes, or killing the enemy damageless.
@@Chubby_Bub Oh, nice to know
@@Chubby_BubI didn’t know you could gain bonus XP for things like that. That’s a good way of have the game scale based on skill level.
Totally agree that the sky island was so much more annoying to navigate, compared to the plateau
Ya took a while(:
I enjoyed looking for Zelda for most of ToTK and then immediately realizing that the white dragon was Zelda when you are pulling out the restored master sword. I also loved being launched out of the tower and surveying the area because it showed that the world truly changed from everything that BoTW was. Link was the only one capable of surveying the land, sky and depths
Another interesting point I learned from a video I watched a while back is how Breath of the Wild's barren world still encourages exploration. How, you ask? Through the use of triangular landscapes, like hills. There’s always a hill that obscures your view in some way, forcing you to scale it to reach your destination. This design keeps the player engaged by creating a constant need to see more of the landscape, even when it seems empty.
I love Tears, especially ultrahand and zonai devices, but Breath is just special to me. Just like all the other Zeldas I will come back to it every once in a while.
Nothing will ever top exiting thr Shrine of Resurrection and seeing Hyrule for the first time. Pure magic 😊
Personally, I got burned out on TotK. There were sooooo many fetch quests, so many things to collect. I stopped in the middle of upgrading my batteries, because running around the Depth was so boring, with everything looking the same, and every single monster group contained at least one silver monster, which aren't exactly hard to kill, but annoying as hell. There are all these cool combat tricks, but you end up rotating your great weapon every time, because it's the only way to deal the necessary damage in a reasonable time.
And as someone who loved exploring the world more than anything else in BotW, Hyrule felt empty to me in TotK. The overworld was too familiar, despite the small tweaks, the sky islands few and far in number, and most didn't offer more than a korok puzzle. The depth had cool corners, but most of it felt incredibly samey, and like I said, where I spent more than 400 hours exploring BotW, I never even got to the final fight in TotK because I was getting bored doing all the collect quests halfway through...
Uh… virtually every side quest in BOTW is a fetch quest. Unlike TOTK which has far more actual quests.
10:20 While I do get what you're saying, Breath of the Wild's world was purposely left barren, often seeming lonely and quiet. it's a post apocalypse world after all, they lost the war against Ganon and Hyrule is broken. If you put that against Tears of the kingdom however, Hryule is healing. Settlements and stables are springing up, the races are leaving their own regions to visit more of the others. An important distinction, one I think Nintendo managed pretty well.
There's one issue I've always had with the talks of "Open Air VS Old School" WHY can't we have gadgets that we get from the dungeons?
Sure, it makes it a LITTLE less "open-world" but realistically just make it any order before the final boss and it's good. Now, for something as game changing and widely used as Fuse I understand giving it to you from the bat to toy with and learn it's limitations, but can you imagine if, say, there were seven dungeons in a "Breath of the Wild 3" each one housing a different Gadger? Cryonis, Bombs, Rewind, Ascend, Fuse, Ultrahand, an upgraded Magnesis where you can give objects a magnetic charge.
And EACH of those dungeons were DESIGNED to give you that toy, teach you how to use it, and THEN, for the boss fight; TEACH YOU HOW TO BREAK IT.
You CAN have your cake and eat it too.
Heck, do it how old zeldas did it; you get the gadget about 1/3rd of the way through the dungeon, but your "real reward" is for beating the boss, this way, it remains open world (Grab the gadget and come back later if you want) AND opens a door for a real interesting way to set up a Speed run "Okay, so we're going to start this dungeon for Cryonis for later, but we don't actually need the item you get for beating the boss, so we won't be returning"
(To be clear; I actually love the Open Air games, they feel like a sandbox rpg, even more so in Tears, which I LOVE, but I understand how they can still improve using lessons from their past.
What you described is exactly what the game tries to do. You get your tools from the "Tutorial" island you don't have to leave it, you can just get the perks and mess about with them for ages before actually doing the quest to leave.
I do like the idea though about getting perks from boss dungeons like the Zelda games of old. But can you imagine the youth of today with the old skool style of tutorials, where you wonder about just trying to figure things out.... They wouldn't have the attention span. Heck OoT when that was first released, boggled my brain. I got through it in the end with a little help from Nintendo magazine Zelda guides each month, I like the way they've gone with the last 2 games myself. It lets a lot of the newer generation enjoy something I've been playing since the early 90's....
Could definitely do with some tweaking though in parts, more difficulty 😁
@@oddpoppetesq.3467well about the attention span thing. Maybe playing a Zelda game that requires more attention would help them? making them more able to focus.
They kind of try doing this with the Champion Abilities and the Sages.
What you just described is the linear-esque gameplay of previous Zelda games.
I miss the champions, wish they would've been mentioned a little bit in totk. Seems most people forgot about them
20:20 I'm not sure what you mean by this because in terms of how the scaling works, BotW and TotK are mostly the same. You get "points" from killing enemies, weighted depending on the enemy's strength, and then specific enemies and weapons scale up at certain thresholds. Those Bokoblins were still red because some enemies have scaling off. The only thing TotK changed about this was that there are more ways to get points from flurry rushes, headshots, and damageless kills.
I remember getting the Master Sword before doing any of the dungeons, then doing the Gerudo dungeon first, not realizing that was the hardest dungeon/boss of the 4 Divine Beasts~~~
I feel like TotK is to BotW, as Majora's Mask is to OoT.
different, weird, darker, a lot of folks will prefer one to the other. And I think they both partner eachother so so well.
I felt not the same wave of emotion from starting BotW as I did when the music started building and going deeper underground in TotK, but sheer excitement as the mood was set.
They're an amazing pair of games.
This is the answer I agree with
Agree completelly
This is so based
I disagree with this, majoras mask changes worlds, has new time travel mechanics and the best side quests and mood of the zelda series. Tears of the kingdom doesn't really build on botw except for its new mechanics
To be honest, Majora's Mask is a better sequel than Tears of the Kingdom.
6:44 nah that's a boomie zoomie
Real
Based and Smant-pilled
Truly a small ant moment
Honestly I've found myself coming back to Botw because of how much fun the glitches & guardians are. I just learned how to do the early master cycle at the beginning of the game inventory slot transfer & weapon modifier corruption are also fun glitches
I think the paraglider in tear's is linked to the skyview tower, which i therefore dont mind that they moved the glider for that purpose. Love your vids mate
I thought the same, in TotK you gain the paraglider to let you use the SkyView tower without dying on the ground. I'm currently playing TotK a second time without paraglider and discovered you can't unlock any SkyView tower without getting the paraglider with Purah first. That's mean, no map and the surface is just a blue screen with a lot of points
@@pedrovictorsilvaladeira7877 Which is why BOTW was designed better. You unlock the Towers as one of your first actions in the tutorial, wheres in TOTK you unlock it relatively way later and as a result it makes the beginning part of the game feel like a slog of needing to do way more "tutorials" until you actually unlock the ability to do what you want, which is especially bad for a game that marketed itself as a sequel. Once you do the Great Plateau, you can do whatever you want. Once you complete the Great Sky Island, you need to go to Lookout Landing first, then you need to talk to Purah, then you need to get some exposition about several things you _just_ learned, then you need to go to the castle to speak to some nobody NPCs that watch Not-Zelda disappear, then you go back to Lookout Landing and talk to Purah again, then you visit the Emergency Shelter and talk to even more NPCs, then you talk to Purah again at the foot of the Tower, then finally get your Paraglider and unlock the ability to activate Towers. It's tedious, and makes replaying the game feel awful.
@@pedrovictorsilvaladeira7877I mean I guess you could get the map and just not use the glider
Botw’s items are all useful in his inventory he has guardian parts (can be use for akkala ancient tech lab to buy op weapons) apples (horses and koroks) shrooms and a fleet loutus seed (cooking for more hearts and special effects)(including rock salt) one cricket a few boko parts and keese parts (for cooking elixirs and selling for money ) (depends on rarity)
My biggest issue with totk is that the framerate is really bad. It doesn't make sense that they added monster raids and a building feature when the console clearly can't handle it and you'll be playing with 10 fps once there are just a few too many parts or npcs on screen.
I've never had the framerate drop that much, is it really that bad for some people?
@@Fiucha8893the sky islands the fps just tanks
@Fiucha8893 For me the worst frame drops were when fighting the Water dungeon boss.
I played through TOTK first and then tried BOTW. Without glitches, I think TOTK just has so many nice traversal tools with zonai devices compared to BOTW where the only thing you use is walking or horse riding. Playing BOTW without knowing glitches, it just feels like you have to walk everywhere and there's no alternative. I guess that can be a good thing too cause the moment you realize you can make a flying machine, there's no real exploration you need to do anymore, you can just fly everywhere
I played BotW first and then TotK and of course, loved both. In February I started replaying BotW on master mode, and it is such a masterpiece. Traversal never seemed like a problem because you have those options that you could get really good at. And glitches are fun :3 also nostalgia for me so I understand why you think that
@@jwechols86 what options outside of glitches are there?
Legitimate question cause I actually just don't know any outside of horse and master cycle
@@haobo_zhang horses and the master cycle and fast travel are it. I think that those options were enough for BotW because it never felt like a hassle to use a horse or pull out the master cycle it felt really fun. You are right though options are definitely limited
@@jwechols86 I guess thats my experience playing BOTW after, everything felt very slow in comparison, like there are no options to climb a mountain besides just climbing and maybe Revali, while there's so many different methods in TOTK.
@@haobo_zhang I definitely get that
In my first playthrough, I had the exact same order as Linkus^^ Thinking back I was like: "why did I not do Rito first?!?!"
I did mipha first then rito and I was so upset when the rito would've made it so easy to get anywhere :(
Imo shrines in Botw are 10 times better than Totk. Way more complex and challenging, while a lot of totk’s shrines are just tutorials for Zonai devices or Rauru’s blessing.
This this this
I think I've figured out why I prefer the old runes over Ultrahand: Ultra is much more on player creativity, offering limited tools for us to combine into whatever function we can mechanically build. But that's the thing; Ascend is simple enough so it's probably my favorite, and Fuse is kinda the gray area, but the others are more obscure and too specific, especially building. I need to think about weight, the distribution, the fuse limit, battery drain, not accidentally killing Link with it, and other stuff I can't remember because it's been over a year probably. Not saying it isn't fun, but what in the world, I'm not an engineer :( And the time reverse is really cool and interesting, but I think it suffers one major factor. At least with building, a lot of it is grounded in real knowledge. It's so hard for me to remember that I can recall time because I never think about it elsewhere, and its use is so stinking specific that nothing else reminds me of it. And yes, some people have found creative uses, but I just cant get the same value out of it, so the whole ability is kind of a flop for me. (And just to get it out, Autobuild needs more Favorite slots. Don't encourage me to experiment with custom ideas and then not offer enough room to save them! I stopped trying new things because I filled all the slots already and I dont want to have to try to rebuild everything from memory. I'm stupid and I'm not gonna pretend I can remember everything!)
The runes were simple. Throw boom. Stop objects and monsters. (I remembered this because freezing monsters is very powerful... and kinda funny) Move metal things. Make ice block. These are much easier to understand and use! They dont overtake your adventure, they're small tools to help you. They're borderline not even really required to understand either.
I'm not saying creativity is bad by any means, but maybe they're cutting away players by the amount of complexity they're demanding the use of.
...And dont get me started on the Sage abilities-
I'm still confused by how people say BotW is "the beta form" of TotK. Neither is perfect, but one makes sure you get the paraglider, and the other - despite its entire point being verticality - lets you get sidetracked and miss it. As well as make menus annoying by making every tab a single page. And now I need to spend limited resources (unless I dupe stuff, which they desperately patch out to pad the play time) to match Ravioli's Gale. Why'd the bird tornado have to leave?! Ah!
Yeah BOTW was just more focused and simple, every design decision and tradeoff made sense for that direction. TOTK has great ideas and lots of fun moments, but got a bit lost in its ambitions.
As someone who tends to not enjoy speed running I think you hit the nail on the head about why I enjoyed tears of the kingdom better. I don't even like to glitch games to play.
I find it hilarious that the same button press you'd use to throw your item for a fall damage cancel in BOTW makes you face plant into the ground in TOTK, I wonder if that was on purpose
I have on purpose not watched any of your TOTK videos cuz I don't wanna spoil the entire game for me so thx for this video that I can actually watch :)
I thought everyone flipped the entire ball maze shit after seeing how hard the fling already is
Ngl. Both hit extremly different for me. The ground travel was fun and to me, i always just enjoy exploring. Its that same cozy feeling of playing skyrim, just not as scary until the guadian gloom music plays for both games.
Its that first awe. Its the fucking around and finding out. I played it so much in early high school which helped a lot mentally.
I think they both have their unique features that are suited for different people, theres a resoudcfulness and a feeling of post apocoleptic feel to it. Scrounging by, toughinf it out and such.
And totk has a fun creativness with the fuse system.
Its such a genius mechanic.
And also just for me personally, i got totk on mothers day last year. It was in my life in a very important time as i had so much drama happening and my depression was an all time low.
And now i listen to the sound tracks for the games to really help me.
Ive never been too big into Legend of Zelda but i love videos on it, the sound track in all of the games are beyond amazing. And i still would absolutly kill for a port of wind waker on switch as i wanted so badly to play games such as wind waker and splatoon on the Wii U but they came out right after my parents sold it. And honestly, i still regret being okay with selling it cus i have a lot of fond memories with the wii U.
I love how gritty botw feels and like it's you vs the world, where totk is more like you living amongst the world
Cleaner experience with a more impactful story, vibes are on point.
For me what made exploration so much better in BotW was that it was more difficult for a casual player. You needed to get gear/stamina/hearts to get to places, or climb hights. God damn how I searched for the climbing set just to explore better. The reward in a game about exploring was to explore better. In Totk you build a hover bike and then you just went wherever you wanted almost immediately. Completely destroyed the reward system
I knew this would happen to me so I didn't allow myself to even think about building a hoverbike back then
Best way to fix the dungeons in totk is only make some select walls climbable, have more of a linear structure with the boss lair having a key to get into, bring back small keys, items should be either abilities or sage abilities
A way to fix the open world dungeons could be for them to cantered around obtaining runes. Sure it would restrict the world a little bit, but it could prevent the typical terminals problem and also give you incentive to plan which dungeon you want to do first by what power you want.
One thing I miss in Breath of the wild is being able to enter the dungeons after you beat them. Since these are some of the coolest looking dungeons on the outside.
You can also use the Master Cycle and horses for wind bombing, which makes it easier. I know the Master Cycle is an end-game item, but it can really help if you want to get around the map faster.
Breath of the Wild is easily on my Mount Rushmore of video games, alongside OG RE4, Super Metroid, and Super Mario Bros 3.
I personally have no beef with the movement of the paraglider to Lookout Landing, as it reinforces what you know that you can fall from any height and land in water. It also makes for a good challenge run where you can choose not to get the paraglider, where in The Breath of the Wild, it is forced upon you.
i also think the paraglider thing in totk is so you dont exploit it in the great sky isle. i think not having it makes you engage with the mechanics of the game more, because theres deff some chests you can get to by gliding rather than the intended ultra hand to grab the chest or move the platforms around. using the arise spell and such.. or whatever its called where you can go up thru ceilings.
I havent even finished totk, played it for a few hours the week it came out then didnt feel the drive to continue yet. I did already play botw for over 200 hours so im sure that was a big part of the burn out. Im playing skyward sword HD and its a great “breath” of fresh air
I may be one of the rare people owning the WiiU version of the game, physical release bought at launch lol
I remember having cheesed the marble motion control thing with the WiiU gamepad too, I was also surprised to see this was so easy, it had to be an intentional way to let the player do it when the gamepad was flipped upside down, else it was super silly to have missed this exploit somehow.
Damn, I have the physical Wii U version of BotW too
For open world dungeons going forward they should make players get upgraded versions in the dungeon. This way the dungeon can be built around the item and the upgrade.
Lets take the Stasis Rune, it stops time, But doing a certain dungeon gets the upgrade version, The Rewind Rune, Which not only stops time but rewind it too.
Another could be giving you the Hookshot early, BUT in one of the dungeons is the upgraded version the Clawshot, allowing you hookshot while on things to get around easier.
i keep thinking of an old movement glitch that used to be popular, and VERY easy to do:
-find a large metal object.
-push any other large object on top of it.
-stand on top of the upper object.
-use the Magnet ability on the metal object.
as i said, VERY easy to do, but much slower than that "bomb wiggle" glitch.
“It’s been over a year since Tears of the Kingdom came out…” immediate mental crisis
TotK came out just after my daughter was born. she can walk now lol
4:57 "and a laser comes ON you" umm... interesting... 😂
FR I WAS JUST CHECKING THE COMMENTS TO SEE IF ANYONE NOTICE3D THAT
10:45 I would totally be down for a tour guide of Hyrule where you're just floating above the land, not necessarily super fast, more like it's a fly-over.
the biggest thing i miss from BOTW is the effect arrows. The TOTK system is good, but why did arrows with elemental effects disappear?
I guess they got rid of it because you have the fuse mechanic. Which is dumb but hey
@@fourthknower9831 they could have easily fixed it by letting us keep some fused arrows in our arsenal instead of making us fuse one arrow at a time, it's sooo annoying
Nothing will ever beat the satisfaction of ragdolling at high speeds around hyrule after mastering wind bombing
im back in my tears of the kingdom era, on my like….3rd playthrough?? i do love it, and i love botw too ofc. i do really like how totk has more shrine replayability because there’s so many different solutions to most of them.
Breath of the wild, 100 procentaged on normal mode. Decided that wasnt good enough, 100 procented on master mode as well. Close to a thousand hours in it and still counting.
Tears of the kingdom 1 playthrough, no 100%.
I like tears of the kingdom, but it just didnt captivate me the same way.
Sort of same. Didn't 100% BotW but replayed it a TON, while only playing TotK once
well when you have 1000hours in botw, of course totk feel boring, same gameplay and nearly same map
@@NielsGx Yeah I get what you mean and sure thats absolutely part of it. But, there are other elements to it as well. At least for my experience. I found the Characters and the storie dumb, childish, poorly executed and just silly. BOTW already had some issues here, but it still had some charm, some very beautifull and touching moments and I felt they mangede to cater to both an adult audience and a younger one with relative succes. TOTK and its main characters, cut scenes etc is a serious downgrade and I dont wanna see any of it again. BOTW actually had me restarting from scratch a couple of time. BOTW has some issues no doubt. TOTK just made them worse. But TOTK has some very strong gameplay as well, with the abilities and freedom to create being some of the best.
@@NielsGx that's not a good argument for totk lol, they should have made it more different
Im actually on my first playthrough of totk and the 2nd memory i watched was the last zelda/mastersword one.. i was so confused and spoiled so i agree it shouldn't have been fixed locations. Also the motion control in botw made me exit shrines when ever i saw it had one, I'm glad its not in totk
I REALLY hated the motion control puzzles in Breath of the Wild. Forced motion controls should _never_ be a thing. They aren't fun. They are an accessibility issue. And if you don't have access to a controller with motion controls you're just screwed.
I remember a few years back the motion controls in my joy cons were broken, essentially the joystick drift but for motion controls, so if you didn't move the controller at all it would just _spin._ And non of my wired pro controllers had motion control. In order to beat those puzzles I _had_ to contend with the broken joy cons, and fight with the motion controls the whole time.
25:30 I loved that shrine it was super hard in the buiging because of that those gaurdian and I still rember getting that edge of duality from the chest seating 50 and thinks it was so good
When he said let's talk about our sponsor I literally yelled "MANSCAPED"
11:15 I think it would have been good if the memories appeared in the order they should have been viewed because the geoglyph does correlate to what the memories show. It would have been weird if you go to the geoglyph that has the dagger and the memory is about Zelda arriving in the past.
They should just do ALBW style. You have all the items available. But each dungeon has a specific item they’re about.
0:22 what I like more, what I like less, and which one is my favorite. These are the same questions lol
fall damage cancelling wasn't entirely "fixed" though in TOTK, there's still an exploit to do it.
The memory order thing is not a hot take at all, I agree, and I don’t think I know of anyone who disagrees
Breath of the Wild was lightning in a bottle never to be repeated!
BotW dungeons were pretty cool (i haven't played TotK) although the fact they use the exact same visual does make them blend in people's mind.
it's the shrines who got a bit redundant especially when there are 120 of them (although a fair bit of them were overworld challenges leading to a free shrine these were some of the more interesting)
but when you have to do several times the "beat the guardian" challenge or the "put the balls in the right receptacles" challenge it's not exactly a thrilling experience.
I hope the next big 3d Zelda is a Linear adventure again.
Saaame
Props to the editor making this video flow so naturally! :D
one way they could make dungeons better is to make it more like a metroidvania, you get the items in the dungeons, but the other dungeons have secrets and stuff for the other items too including fun shortcuts
also, i enjoyed the shrines in totk more. those felt more challenging and having the fuse and ultrahand abilities added to the creativity.
Ngl, I liked Totk, but frankly Botw just had more charm with how dynamic the world felt as you progressed. Sure the dungeons were meh but the world is fantastic.
I casually learned how to clip through walls to beat the sword trial because I died to something I felt was unfair in the second to last room XD It was fascinating to traverse that area out of bounds. Felt more rewarding than doing it normally especially after I already did 99% of it normally and still had to defeat the boss.
When i first played botw, i went straight to the gerudos, because my wife loves them and after beating the beast i Was very dissapointed to find out, that every other boss fight was the same and much less interesting to fight. And even if i love botw, totk is much more superior in my view. But u gotta point in the Power ups u are getting. Imo botw did it better, then having all of the ghosts with u all the time.
But besides that great Video as always linkus and keep up the good work
TotK is a great game and all, but BotW just had that special something that TotK was missing. I think your comments on the opening cutscenes sums it up pretty well. And I wholeheartedly agree with needing the sages to be out to use the abilities in TotK being a massive pain.
Though, I will say that I wish Revali's Gale was less clunky to use. Between needing to basically stop moving and only having 3 uses before a several minute long cooldown, which doesn't start rolling until all 3 uses are gone, I never liked it much. Especially compared to Ascend, Gale just feels a lot more limited, even considering the extra freedom of being able use it to some effect virtually anywhere vs only with something above you.
I love both games dearly.
They are so different yet so similar. Kind of fascinating.
What drives me crazy about TotK is how useless the sage abilities are in real combat. Talking to random walking NPCs is the worst. Especially since D-Pad down is completely free to bind to another wheel for you to select the ability you want. Also being able to send back or pull out sages with this imaginary D-Pad Down wheel would be so much better... By trying to remove menu clutter they ironically added menu clutter.
Both games have weaknesses but both can suck you in and get you invested so heavily... masterpieces.
Totk is almost considered mediocre because they literally left the same map (which completely removes the point of exploration if you have already explored the map in the previous one). They showed sky islands so much in the trailer/teasers making people think it would be huge or super awesome but were so small and unrewarding THE BEST SKY ISLAND IS LITERALLY THE TUTORIAL PLACE. The depths were actually pretty good.
17:24 I've known that you can flip it upside down for years
I remember almost nothing about the divine beast dungeons, lol. They just felt like chores that I had to get over with, so I could get back to exploring the world.
I LOVE Tears of the Kingdom, but Breath of the Wild will always have a special place in my heart. Since the release of Breath of the Wild, I hit puberty, lost family members, moved to 3 different houses, made a life-long friend that I talk to every day, and started my senior year of high school, and Breath of the Wild was a retreat to something familiar through all of that. I've gone from the innocent little kid I once was to a maturing guy whose stuck in life's fast lane.. I've spent hundreds of hours in Breath of the Wild, replaying it, speedrunning, exploring, getting Korok seeds (still haven't gotten quite all of them yet! 😂), listening to the Hateno Village and Gerudo town themes, and so much more. The ending of the Champion's Ballad had me in tears, and I still find new areas to explore. Tears of the Kingdom was a real treat, and with over 2 hundred hours of play time, it's definitely a top 5 game for me, but Breath of the Wild just has so much more significance in my personal life. That, and I like BOTW's ambient music for exploring the regular overworld better than TOTK's! 😁
17:58 - That was the order I did my first BOTW playthrough too! o/
The only thing that's better in BotW over TotK is the framerate.
This video was a great nostalgic trip.
In my mind what puts totk below botw is that u can do infinite playthroughs of botw and find a new way to enjoy it where totk is a little more stale for repeat playthroughs
I had so much silly fun in the totk shrines (mainly because I kept whacking myself) and they were a bit harder, so totk shrines for me!
I think the nonlinearity that I would want from these open world games that I think would solve my problems with these new dungeons is if they did the dungeon/equipment system from Link Between Worlds. All of the dungeons are open to complete in any order but centered around a specific item, but all of the items are available to rent/buy from the beginning.
18:08 i did naboris first got stuck for an hour bc i didn't understand the 2nd phase then looked it up and that was the first time i had a zelda experiance using something you got a long time ago
1:00 Is Wind Waker not open world? Also the first and second Zelda games were open world too no?
I like the way tears did dungeons better. It was a great way to show homage to older games with the build up to dungeons. Creating a story for them and the journey to get in. FYI, I'm not a speedrunner, just sharing my opinion
I'm not all the way through the video but I do want to make a note here: the memories in totk are annoying if you get them out of order, but if they were going to force them to be played in a specific order then it might not work to have all 10 spots available at once and just play them in order because the locations of the tears are tied to the memory that comes with them. I like it could be better to have them be similar to other quests where each one becomes available as you collect the previous one. Like some sort of "oh! there's tell of a new geoglyph in xyz region! link we should go investigate." That way you could unlock the memories in order without losing the very specific locations. Or! potentially there could be something that you get when you pick up the geoglyphs quest that tells you the order (rather than/alongside the forgotten temple room which I think has them in order on the wall but I am unsure, i havent looked into that very closely)
The dungeon leadup in totk is definitely so So long. I'm doing a third full playthrough and it genuinely took me over an hour to do dragonhead islands yesterday, to the point I didnt even want to actually do the spirit temple after. The leadup to, for example, the wind temple ended up taking me 2 sessions, and then I did the actual temple on a third session. I prefer the actual totk dungeons though, the ones in botw are puzzley in a way that makes me just want to get them over with so I end up looking up a guide instead of trying to figure out/remember how to do the puzzles
Watching the gerudo dungeon reminded me of another point. I thought I would miss elemental arrows but tbh? I don't really. I like being able to choose if I need to tie an elemental thing to an arrow or save my arrows/bow durability and just chuck it (I do electrocute and explode myself a lot but it is what it is lol)
I do miss stasis momentum building (looking at that golf shrine lol) but I do agree that recall is a much better version of stasis haha
Love ToTK but BoTW was truly a moment. Like a “you just had to be there” moment.
When he realised that you could flip the platform in the motion controls shrine 😂
Yeah everyone does it differently! i personally do it much more personally I tilt the ball through the maze all the way over to the chest and leave the final path in the maze at a downwards slant then enter the maze and push the ball into the right position and stasis it and launch it towards its destination like I said it’s a much more upfront and personal way to do it.
your explanation of the guardian encounter is exactly what happened to me 😭
I think I like TotK shrines more if only because it was so much easier to find all of them thanks to their lightroot counterparts in the Depths. Made it do much easier to seek them out.
I feel that had TotK come out before BotW, and BotW released as a prequel game, then TotK would have been seen as the better game.
This is because the whole "open world Zelda" format would have been given to us on the larger game first, so we would have seen it as better in every way by the time BotW, a smaller game, released. They gave us the format in BotW first and that's why it FEELS better than TotK - when in actuality it's not. But that's just my opinion.