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@@dominikstute5810 If you’re saying they wouldn’t be called Zelda-likes without the name being attached, doesn’t that mean the identity of the series has been lost?
The only things that make BOTW and TOTK Zelda games are the main characters and location setting. The stories barley fit in with past Zelda games other than Gannon, and the sages. Various minor story elements, the names of characters, and the fact that it takes place in Hyrule are what make it Zelda. The actual gameplay does not feel like Zelda much at all.
i think so, though it depends on how much they would have changed about the games. Youd have to change a LOT about these titles for them to feel like a completely different series, and at that point the hypothetical doesnt even matter cause we're talking about a whole different game by that point. Yada yada yada, ship of theseus, yada yada yada.
@@LinkLink-wx5hhYou can make anything into any aesthetic. A sword could be a medieval steel blade or a cyberpunk laser stick. They're both short, swingable melee weapons. A gun could be a military hand cannon, a large squirt gun, or a bubbling witch cauldron. They're all ranged weapons that lob a large piece of ammo that causes splash aoe damage. Apply this to concept to any game genre. Skins in games make it easy to see, but think of like Overwatch vs Paladins. Both are hero shooters. Mostly similar mechanics. One uses futuristic aesthetics, the other fantasy (with guns, but you shoot magic from a lantern, flaming sword beams, magic mirror laser along with crystal powered rifle, thrown daggers etc). So art style and direction are up for debate. From a gameplay standpoint, they make a difference on mechanics and feel (Mario and Sonic both are platformers. Both play wildly different). If you reskinned the open air Zelda games, you'd never mistake them as the Zelda genre. That is the argument. And frankly, I've played more than a few BotW "clones", and I think each one handles the concept better than the Zelda games. Not even stepping into IPs that actually were built for open world gaming in mind (see Elden Scrolls, or Witcher).
I just want a linear story in Zelda games again. One of my biggest gripes on new Zelda is how they made the story feel less connected due to you, the player, having to go out of your way to find context clues to piece together the entire narrative. And you don't even know which cutscenes are first, second, middle, or last.
I hate shrines. Every quest leads to a shrine. Everything in these new games leads to a shrine. I spend hours trying to do a quest and there is alot of build up to solving the quest and I get exited. Then I am rewarded…. With a shrine rising from the floor…. 😐
@@hyrumstephens2002 I think the biggest loss was the sense of being in a very special place. When I enter Forest Temple in OoT or Tower of The Gods in WW, it feels like a VERY unique and at one point sacred location. And plus, the fact that I know I won’t ever return to it in my playthrough makes my time there even more special. With a shrine it’s like “okay another one of these”. It doesn’t feel special.
@@WITAWITAVG I agree. I liked the idea of shrines. Almost like mini dungeons all over the map. But they could have made them more zelda feeling and offered cooler rewards. They looked ugly too
@@hyrumstephens2002 Maybe more variety. A shadow shrine, a spirit shrine, a water shrine, a special goron shrine, a one of a kind zonai shrine, maybe a shrine that takes you back to the past before the world was destroyed. Like just more variety and creativity. But still dont think they should be given as rewards for quests unless it is the continuation of a quest. (Hey my brother went inside that cave please save him. Then you go in and its actually like a shrine and you fight some monster and save him. Then you are rewarded with a new item, mask, outfit, weapon. Maybe like… a hookshot or somethin?. Idk. Not just a life container) but idk i just feel the new zeldas are alot less creative and much more predictable. Everything looks the same. Everything is solved the same way. All the dungeons and locations are boring. The music is boring. The bosses are mid. The quests, story, characters, cutscenes, everything basically… is boring 😐. And that was never the case before breath of the wild was a thing in the world of zelda… I was always exited for what comes next.
Perfect video bro. You described a lot of what I love about old Zelda. I'm honestly depressed we probably won't get much of that anymore, since Aonuma has some sort of legitimate obsession with the "open air" aspect of modern Zelda.
Yeah. I can’t talk bad about Aonuma since he helped bring about so many of my favorite games of all time. But you can tell in the last 10+ years he’s really trying to move away from the traditional style. I honestly don’t understand why people think tradition and formula are bad things for sequels. When you have to wait 4-6 years (oftentimes more) for a sequel, I WANT that comforting formula I enjoyed in previous games. This goes for most series not even just Zelda.
No, he has an obsession with profit, methinks. BotW and TotK together (in the amount of time they've existed: 7 years) have sold more copies together than every other Zelda game combined (in the amount of time THEY'VE existed... 1989-2024... 35 years) It's obviously more profitable. But that's how everything goes nowadays, huh? Soulless cash-grabs.
I believe Zelda, the series as a whole’s game design philosophy before the BoTW era was best described as “emphasized player freedom within linear gameplay and story progression” IE: you have a destination, a dungeon that needs to be cleared, but how you clear that dungeon while linear does still allow for some player exploration and freedom. Enough to where unintended sequence breaks can occur. Modern Zelda’s philosophy would best be summarized something like this, “player freedom with small moments of linearity and game progression” IE: no matter where you are or what you’re doing, unless it’s strictly guided you aren’t progressing the main story, this allows the player to do as they please without concern for plot progression, it’s part of the reason the stories in these two games haven’t exactly been stellar, because that isn’t the focus anymore.
I miss the old Zelda, straight from the 'Go Zelda Chop up the ghouls Zelda, set on his goals Zelda I hate the new Zelda, the bad mood Zelda The always rude Zelda, spaz in the news Zelda I miss the sweet Zelda, chop up the beats Zelda I gotta to say at that time I liked to play Zelda See I invented Zelda, it wasn't any Zeldas And now I look and look around and there's so many Zeldas I used to love Zelda, I used to love Zelda I even had the green tunic, I thought I was Zelda What if Zelda made a game about Zelda Called "I Miss The Old Zelda " man that would be so Zelda That's all it was Zelda, we still love Zelda And I love you like Zelda loves Zelda
I desperately need the Zelda team to play Portal and then be forced to play through their shrines to know how badly they missed the mark on both designing 'dungeons' and test chambers.
Yeah, cause they're not only short, 1-off puzzles, but they also can't build on each other like the Portal test chambers can. The only shrines that have an order are the first few being before all the rest, and maybe the last one only appearing after you did all the rest of them. There can be no gameplay progression or skill building with that. Sure, you can make some a little more complex, but outside of combat shrines, they all basically have to be playable as if they're the first one you found post-tutorial
@@Chronoflation Place the harder shrines in harder to reach locations, cluster shrines which build upon eachother, and let the player struggle if they haven't learned the prerequisite mechanics. Better yet, use dungeons to tutorialize puzzle complexity. Not everything needs to be instantaneous gratification.
@@Ianmar1 I agree it shouldn't be instantaneous gratification. The problem with clustering shrines is that when you go through them properly, it'll just make the games repetitiveness that much more obvious, and you'll still have the issue of not having the types of puzzles you learn to solve becoming more advanced throughout the whole game. Difficulty resets with each cluster. And then other times you'll just wind up doing them in the wrong order or otherwise just running to the wrong shrine. I really don't see a way that they can do this in an open world format unless they lock shrines away behind game progression. For example, when you start, there could be only 20 shrines available. When you beat all or half those shrines, or maybe the first dungeon that tests the puzzle skills from those initial shrines, you'll unlock another batch of shrines. 20 or so per dungeon would ensure a regular pace of increased things to do, increased difficulty, etc. The problem is that this would make the dungeons be linear, and lord knows that Aonuma will not stand for FORCING players to engage with anything in his games in a specific order. And I'm sure Aonuma would never make 5+ versions of each of these dungeons for playing them in different orders. He barely makes mediocre single versions of each of his "dungeons" as is
I agree with much of what you say here. I miss old Zelda too and I was disappointed by TOTK treading the same ground and making some of the same mistakes that BOTW made. The thing that annoys me the most is the dungeons and the "Go activate the things to get to the boss". What happened to item progression in these games? That was one of the things that made Zelda great and now its gone.
I don't know why UA-cam recommended this video to me with under 400 views, especially since I've never heard of you before, but I am so glad it did. You have articulated my frustrations with the new Zelda games and my longing for old Zelda, and I agree with almost all of what you said. Thank you for this.
To give an example of what you said about new dungeon items unlocking more of the game and feeling like a reward, I think of a particular piece of heart in Link's Awakening. In the Mysterious Forest, you can come across a room very early game with a chest across a gap, and across an even bigger gap, there is a piece of heart with some rocks near it. The first time you see this room, you know you can't get the rewards. But then you get the Roc's Feather, and you might think to go back there, but then realize you can't jump far enough to get the reward. But then later you get the Pegasus Boots, and you actually _can_ then get far enough to get the chest... but not far enough to get the piece of heart. So you leave again. And then eventually you get the hookshot, and you are _finally_ able to make it to the piece of heart. And I feel like this room in the Mysterious Forest is a perfect encapsulation of the sort of thing you're talking about with old Zelda. We don't get this sort of situation in new Zelda, where you can solve every single puzzle the first time you run across it.
@@MuffinsAPlenty Yes!!! This is the “language” of the design I was talking about at the end of my video. It’s like a perfect mix of action-adventure, metroidvania, with a splash of RPG elements in there. It was so perfect and now it feels completely abandoned. Thank you for watching my video. I’ve officially gotten my UA-cam algorithm to start suggesting me smaller content creators, and I love finding them and supporting them. Thank you for doing the same for me :)
The final nail in the coffin in BotW for me was when I realized I needed a USB-C charger for the master sword. They put limitations on the legendary sword that is known to fight the dark, and it has a charge..
I actually think it's cool idea. It further emphasises the apocalyptic nature of the world that even the Master Sword has withered, and making it recharge overtime is still a good way to make it feel unique. Plus, still makes you to use different weapons. Its just TOO nerfed to the point where it doesn't really feel special.
The new games would be better if weapons weren’t destroyed and instead determined your playstyle like elden ring. Bring back real dungeons, real towns, and a big overworld.
Same boat, I don't enjoy open world Zelda very much. In my case, Echoes has disappointed me since it's fronting like a traditional Zelda, but it's anything but. Desperately just wanted a classic game with Link with a back to basics focus after accepting 2D was the only way fans like me would be catered to. Then, even still, we aren't catered to, outright defied and given "open design" in 2D as well. The gameplay still reeks of that open, unrestricted find your own solution design. Rule of thumb is if a puzzle has dozens of solutions, then the problem presented can't be very steep to keep all solutions viable. I'll just stick to playing older titles from now on. Aonuma doesn't seem interested in making Zelda games anymore, at least as we knew them.
"Why would anyone ever want to go back to something more restrictive? Of course, I understand the argument, but people only think they enjoyed these games because of nostalgia." -Aonuma, basically
@@vivilover9409 the best a Zelda game can be with the more free form approach. Though the dungeons did take a hit imo because they could only be certain you had one item at a time so they crafted the puzzles that way. Still much prefer titles that don't attempt the choose your own path style
I agree. I suppose with Aonuma's distaste with the old Zelda that we should look to new games and series that better scratch that itch. The tight, carefully crafted design of Metroid Prime Remastered made me feel like I was playing Twilight Princess for the first time again, and now I'm way more hyped for Metroid Prime 4 than any new Zelda they're coming out with these days
I agree with pretty much everything you said. Botw was fun, and i always thought that the sequel would be a new zelda game just using the same engine (like oot and mm). After the years of waiting, totk is the most disappointing game. Same map, same dungeon locations and objectives, same shrines, same korok seeds, same story telling, same combat, same weapons, same enemies. Only now you dont get to adeventure through the world you just teleport and fly everywhere. Its sad that aonuma thinks non-limited gameplay is always better. I stopped playing totk, but i remember when i was in the volcano dungeon i ended up using zonai devices to get to the thing, skipping all the minecart puzzle, and being sad because it seemed like it wouldve been a fun dungeon if the game didnt just let me skip it
6:20 NGL, I will probably be subbing to your channel for the inclusion of this music alone. Also doesn’t hurt you are 100% correct that new Zelda is basically an Erector Set dressed up in Zelda skin. I am still convinced BOTW was supposed to be a new IP that Nintendo was too afraid to give a chance to be its own thing so slapped some Zelda face paint on it and called it a day. It pains me to no end now when Aonuma basically says old Zelda is a relic of days past and the new formula is here to stay. New Zelda is missing pretty much everything that made the old Zelda, well Zelda (at least that is my opinion, but I am finding out more and more I’m not the only one who shares it).
I totally agree with you. I hate to say it, but I think the players deserve at least some of the blame here for slamming Spirit Tracks and Skyward Sword as hard as they did for being "too linear" or something. I think it caused Nintendo to reverse course for the next game that was already in the works, take ages to release the next game, and then finally put out something that feels like a single-player MMO or an unfinished beta near the end of the Wii U's life. Well, I guess now we don't get any games in the old formula now because all the creative, "make your own adventure" types who should be playing Minecraft or Skyrim have taken over our franchise and now we have nothing. :(
I do agree that it serves them right for dunking on Skyward Sword. Oh, you think it’s too linear? Here, you can have a game AND a sequel to it that aren’t linear at all 😂
Yeah seriously, I always liked SS, but the loud people crying about linearity, how about no more "linear" zelda ever again, now it's been 13 years and we don't get zelda anymore besides botw and totk(and link between worlds). (The 13 years before SS included OOT, MM, oracles, WW, minish cap, Twilight princess, and the ds games)
I like Breath of the Wild but aside from fighting Lynels and pretending I'm playing a remake of Zelda 1, I stick to Skyrim for all my open worlding. still hasn't gotten old.
What does that make Totk in your eyes, genuine question question LMAO I personally dislike they had a lot of irl time for how much they produced / new content we got
I am so happy that more and more people are making videos like this. I can’t stand what they did to Zelda. It isn’t even the same kind of game anymore. Modern Zelda should be treated like a spin off. Let’s get back on track Nintendo. Rom Hackers are making better games than you are.
@@WITAWITAVG I just finished Ultimate Trial, Project Indigo, and Escape from the Facility in the past two weeks. It’s like I’m playing actual Zelda games.
Would have been cool if climbing was an item or a power you have to earn. Hook/claw/new concept shot would be cool too combined with the paraglider to glide fast.
As a super fan of a game like Mirror’s Edge, I will say that you can NEVER expect more of a game. The medium of gaming is brand new and far too fluid. Enjoy the game while it’s there, or don’t. That’s not to say don’t have opinions or criticize, but know that the trends will always change, and love what YOU love in games. Games are highly personal by nature, it’s YOUR experience that YOU play, but they are still made to be experienced and played by millions of people over the course of decades. They care about your experience, but don’t exactly place a lot of bets on replicating even moderate successes. You will see sort of similar trends until the trends move on or the need to reinvent/switch things up, and they do. I was a fallout fan in high school and I waited for that new single player fallout game after I played Fallout 4, and I’m still waiting today. Hasn’t happened. Gaming is a process of waiting for the thing, being pumped about the thing, experiencing the thing, and patiently waiting for/researching the next thing. It kind of sucks, but they haven’t really solved the problem. They create new one off designer drugs every few months, get us hooked, all before figuring out the supply chain…
If the next big 3D one is another BOTW/TOTK style I might skip it. I actually put TOTK down for a few months before I eventually went back and beat it. It’s just not my style of game anymore. Echoes of Wisdom looks dope though!
@@WITAWITAVG indeed. I was tired of TOTK it all felt like a bloated mess and the shrines were repetitive I miss the dungeons. I beat the story and never went back collecting everything 100 percent. Yeah echoes of wisdom looks ok I’ll have to play it. Wish Nintendo remade the oracle games though that would’ve been mind blown lol
@@WITAWITAVG yup I doubt they’ll do it unless Capcom collabs lol. It’s all good though I still have them and I replay them a couple of times every year
@@WITAWITAVG I think they'll do it if they see profit in it. Nintendo has the money to outright buy all the rights to the oracles games from capcom, they just choose not to. The switch generation has been nothing but tunnel vision for the Zelda team ever since BoTW blew up, they aren't even creative any more because everything BoTW and ToTK does is done better in other open world games.
I noticed some Castlevania music in the background of your video. Noice. Subterranean Hell, I think? From Dawn of Sorrow. At around 2:11... Sorry I just really love that game so hearing a track in a LOZ video caught me by surprise 😮
An intellectual and happy man likes both Zeldas. 30 years of the old Zelda is plenty. Only thing i miss about old Zelda are the dungeons but the lightning temple is fucking goated. Crazy thumbnail though
@@WITAWITAVGdon’t listen to him, he’s a self proclaimed intellectual who’s insulting your opinion by suggesting your wrong for having it. A true midwit. The new games are good, but they aren’t Zelda. You’re correct.
Great video man! I think my problem with this is that instead of switching Zelda up from the at the time stale linear formula, they permanently abandoned it for a new formula. It’s fine to do a new idea every now and then, but they’ve completely abandoned what made Zelda ZELDA. No good dungeons, no unique scenarios, no story that actually takes place during the game,. And the staleness people claimed about the linear games is gonna happen to the open world games too, it’s already happening with Totk. Botw and Totk both start with Link waking up on a starting area where a ghost of a king guides him to 4 shrines with 4 new abilities, before being let loose into the world, where you can get memories to learn about the story and then go to the 4 corners of the world and interact with the 4 races to help them with a problem in their region. I think the better solution is to alternate between both styles, so after Totk we get a linear game and then after that an open game, so neither get stale. I love open world Zelda and linear Zelda even more, so I wish they could just coexist, even if linearity is just in the 2D games. Alas, I doubt that’ll happen, it seems linear Zelda is dead, with even the 2D Zelda games being open world games (EoW)
It sucks that new Zelda is so popular that companies made their knock off versions asap - that Ubisoft not-Kid Icarus game, Sonic Frontiers...even Oceanhorn changed from an old Zelda copycat to new Zelda
Nintendo is just too fixated on the idea of Zelda needing to be as open as possible. It does not need this. If instead of having one gigantic open world, we had first access to, say, 60% of the whole map, and freedom to explore and do things in any order, then we had some huge mid game plot-twist style event, and then that opened up the remaining 40%, with new items and exploring mechanics, all this followed by the endgame, then the games would, at least for me, get to that sweet spot between the amazing freedom of BOTW and the incredible pacing of Oot. I'd call this "hierarchical open world" xD
You’re so right. Instead of blending both styles, they ditched the linear style for a more open style. I garuntee a lot of us older Zelda fans would be satisfied if they did what you said, slightly downsizing the world and having actual dungeons, giving you more traversal opportunities
Twilight Princess was linear but after the first few dungeons it opens up and let's you freely explore hyrule fields and do side content And if u don't want to u don't have to because the game is straightforward about where to progress the story next I think if they do an open world zelda again they just need to let the player explore some areas freely but the rest of the world will open up gradually the more you progress the story. It could work as an evolution of what older games did while being mostly like botw since that's their obvious direction
I'll watch the video in the morning, but chiming in based only on the title... I agree with the title. A big part of the Zelda franchise for me has long been storytelling, and the connectivity between the games. Both of which absolutely *suck* in New Zelda. Not only do BotW and TotK feel utterly disconnected from the rest of the games on the timeline outside of the fanservice references of costumes and area names, but TotK itself feels like a reboot of BotW - it's like BotW never happened. If you gave someone TotK to play first, they'd probably just think the few references to BotW were background information, not a whole other game. And the open-world, do everything in your own order sucks as a storytelling system. As do the memories, especially finding them in the wrong order. I don't know what Aonuma was smoking when he tried to justify the lack of linearity with "technically, each player has a linear experience, it's the path they choose" - that is NOT what the people saying they prefer linear games mean. They want a story with a strong beginning, end and a linear sequence of plot beats on the way between them, not "go out into the world and meet back here after you've done for designed-as-if-they're-all-the-first-thing-you-do plotlines, and then we'll do the end". And every time I watch a memory I wish I was playing THAT game, instead of the one I am playing. Side note, the music is also severely lacking. The OST for TotK was announced a few weeks back and I was absolutely DUMBFOUNDED by the fact it has more discs than the Kingdom Hearts 3 OST. I can only remember one track I consider good from each of BotW and TotK. If you asked me, I'd have said there's almost no music, especially nothing worth more than one disc. Whereas I remember the music from Zeldas past with fondness. (It's also worth noting the one track in TotK that made me hype was a rendition of a Wind Waker theme, so it's not even special to TotK - I won't be looking back fondly on TotK music in ten years like I did with Wind Waker, hearing that theme). The puzzles also largely suck with such openness of design. I'm really worried about this new 2D Zelda game. The way he said players will have 'different solutions' for puzzles makes it sound as though there aren't actually any puzzles like in traditional Zeldas, merely obstacles to get around, and that's not as fun. Even the most frustrating puzzle in the Zelda series for me, in Phantom Hourglass, I fondly look back on as I remember the feeling of finally working out the answer without a guide, and annoyance at how long it took me given how simple it wound up being. I can't say I've had a similar experience in either of the last two games. It's great people like the new games, I just wish they also did more traditional, smaller-scale bit still meaty Zelda games for those of us who like the old formula - and Echoes of Wisdom doesn't sound like it's gonna be it. I've gone from a day-one buyer to doubting I'll play any more of the games in the future. How's that for "the grass is greener", Aonuma?
Also, what's the point in giving each player a different experience when everything feels so generic you can't just say "how did you beat X Shrine" without having to describe it with enough detail the other person knows wtf you're talking about. It's not like the old days where people were able to talk about specific dungeons and everyone knew what you were talking about. The most interesting things you could discuss about the new games with other people get lost in the sheer amount of it, and the fact most of it isn't immediately recognisable.
I personally play the new games like I would the old ones (it's not as good but I find it more satisfying) I basically try to limit myself like the old games would by only exploring places directly tied to the main story in the order I visit them, or if a side quest guides me there (doing shrines, exploring cave etc...). I leave the rest for post game !
I think the design mantra of "total player freedom" has been complete poison for the new Zelda games. The sad thing is that an actually good, modern Zelda that took inspiration from Zelda 1 would have been really exciting, but BotW failed miserably in that goal. Even though Zelda 1 was quite open in its design, it still limited you with regards to where you could go and there was a clear difficulty progression with the dungeons and late-game areas, even though some things could be done out of order. Zelda 1 was a great example of an open world with "Soft Linearity", the other examples being Dark Souls 1, Metroid Zero Mission and The Witness. BotW and TotK are just regular sandbox games. It would have been really cool if BotW had proper dungeons (maybe their style being a mix of Zelda 1 and A Link to the Past), that the player has to find themselves in the overworld. Exploration should require skill and preparation. Too much of the level design geometry is trivialized with the sailcloth and climbing, making the traversal pretty samey across the whole game. The food and armor systems are pretty much broken and you will never die if you understand how they work. There is often no reason to engage with the enemy camps, and it's actively bad after the midgame, because they drain more of your resources than replenish them. I think the player should only be able to cook and change clothing in Stables, and you could only carry 4-5 cooked meals at a time. You should also only have checkpoints (like the bonfires in Dark Souls) at stables, towns, and certain camps, not an auto-save which saves constantly. I wish this kind of 3D game, that truly understood the genius of Zelda 1's overworld and dungeon design and improved on it, will be made by some studio eventually, but I have zero faith in modern Nintendo ever making a game like that.
I really hope we can get a tri-force of sorts of zelda games from now on. Old 2D, old 3D & new 3D though I believe Eiji Aonuma said they're moving away from old 3D so☹️
I agree a few road blocks like in "link to past" would have been great middle ground. But i never got people complaining of pacing in an open world. The pace in 95% up to u. Dont like side quests, dont do they.... even with the food system u can bypass doing so many shrines if u dont want to. Great video 👍
You basically describe the same feelings I have with the series. For me BOTW and TOTK are good for... well, basically modern gamers. The type of people that think that every genre needs an open world and love running around empty vastness of nothingness and oogle at... well, actually nothing. I personally just like well crafted, interested and varied dungeons more. And the Items you get with it. Even the empty ocean of Wind Waker is more varied in its puzzles and uses as BOTW and TOTK together, which has 99% Korok Seeds of like... 5 puzzle varieties and the rest goes into the shrines. Which are a nice idea, but they still become boring, with all of them basically looking the exact same. Also 100% agree on the feeling you achieved nothing until the 20 hour gameplay mark. Thats because you spent 99% of your time running from map marker to map marker. Makes me wonder why people hate UbiSoft games. Their map markers at least fill the map a lot more.
Nintendo has an "Innovation" Problem. They need to Innovate Every-Fucking-Thing, from Control Schemes taking Center Stage and Other Pointless Shit. Yeah, how did "Innovation" work out for the Starfox Franchise, Nintendo?
Really these new games only needed small tweaks to progression (even though I want traditional items back) 1. Each completed shrine allows you to either level your stamina or hearts right then and there instead of saving up 4. 2. Rune/Arm abilities are previewed in the tutorial, but unlocked after certain Village-related quests are completed. Sprinting (Pegasus shoes), the Paraglider, and climbing (climber gloves) are available mid-game opening things up at the middle. 3. Memory/Tears have to be done in order. Narrative/story is by definition linear.
I was literally saying the same thing last night, that BotW and TotL are fantastic games, but not Zelda games by any stretch, and that they should have been their own unique IPs.
The open world has also really hurt the story and ever since twilight princess we haven’t gotten as many cinematic scenes as you would think by now. I miss caring about the story and it actually feeling developed
Twilight princess has a great story but the recent manga adaptation expands it even more in a really interesting way, I'd love to see that direction in a zelda game but they don't wanna take a risk by letting link speak or going back to a t rating. E10 max lol
I guess the sad truth is... we are just growing up, and the franchise also did. And when we came to the realization that the formula was changing, it struck us so hard that we couldn't process the information. I was definetely excited for Breath of the Wild back in 2016, and while I bought the game in 2018, I refused to finish it. Sure, was happy that Tears of the Kingdom was coming when it was first announced in 2019 but, for some reason, I just wasn't excited. Till this day I have no reasons to buy the game, and while Echoes of Wisdom looks fun, I don't think I'll buy it. Guess that all that truly remains is yearning for the past. I can go to it, but it will not come back to me.
It has nothing to do with getting older or the formula being "outdated". It has to do with them changing the entire genre of the IP to hit the mainstream open world market and abandoning the old one. TotK lost Game of the Year to a turn based rpg. Remember that. Turn based rpgs are one of the oldest genre in gaming history.
@@amandaslough125 Never said it was "outdated", and I think this the "Old" formula still works if they try. God of War (2018) follows a similar formular and made big numbers in cash. I understand that Nintendo wants to appeal to wider audiences, but that doesn't mean the have to get rid of the old style.
Aonuma really does explicitly hate old Zelda. He's commented on it numerous times at this point and his obsession with "breaking conventions" is just a bullshit way of saying "I couldn't make my gimmicks in old Zelda sell, so now I made a mass appeal open world game and am forcing a Zelda skin onto it so I can do all the gimmicks I want and people will still buy it because it's a giant open-world game"
Yeah, I super agree. Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom are great games and I love them, but they have a lot of flaws too. There are too many fetch quests. The shrines are kinda boring. The four main dungeons are boring just go hit these five switches then fight the boss quests. The non-linear gameplay makes it so you can get story beats in a really weird order, and it can feel like the whole game is spoiled because you found the most climactic revealing memory first. Because of the non-linear nature of the game the rewards and treasures for pretty much everything feel mediocre and not worth it. A lot of time getting the items you need for upgrades just feels like a grinding slog. There's too much empty space with nothing to do between important locations. I don't consider Koroks, random enemy encampments, or mediocre treasure as "something to do". Ok some of the shrine have interesting puzzles, but most of them are just too easy. I miss those days of old Zelda where I would be in the middle of a dungeon and get so confused because I was missing a key or something and had to solve some complicated puzzle.
Ive played through every single one of them consecutivey throughout the years of release, and I think BOTW and TOTK are the best! They have so much more to do, and can hold my attention for a ridiculous amount of time. The older titles I can just speedrun through like nothing.
My first zelda game was botw and one of my favorites. i replay almost all the zelda games. and i wish nintendo would do new amd old becauce the new one is not doing it for me anymore. i has nothing to do with nostalgia
I feel like something changed after games like Skyrim came out and people didn't like Skyward Sword as much when it came out that games had to be these open world experiences, and japanese developers started feeling like western game philosophies were surpassing Japanese games and they tried to make Zelda feel like a more western game since Zelda is HUGE in the west. But japanese game philosophy has a little more.....nuance or handles how the user experiences the story EXACTLY how intended, and western games wanna focus on the player "creating their own story". I really want to make a video called "How Xenoblade Chronicles ruined Breath of the Wild for me" because I know Monolith Soft worked on BOTW/TOTK and the big man upstairs STILL won't put NPC relationship trees and INTERESTING npc side quests in their OPEN world Zelda and I know they have it in them. Love hearing xenogears and tales of symphonia tracks in the video ❤
there are aspects of botw and tears that feel frustrating and lacking in comparison to the old Zelda, but I think they absolutely have a place in the series (perhaps botw more than tears tbh... but if we just view tears as a pure sequel then i think it fits). Hopefully in the future we'll find a real union of the old and new. It was such a disappointment that tears did not incorporate proper dungeons in the way we were hoping for
I don't like the new Zelda games either. I wish there were more Zelda likes. I have never played a game outside of the Zelda series that really managed to scratch the Zelda itch for me. The closest is actually an old game from the Gamecube era called Sphinx and the Cursed Mummy (it is also on Switch).
8:12 it genuinely is tedious game design for the sake of it. Totk forces you to go to the sky islands for sundelions, underground for zonite, farm food before fighting because why not, farm rupees and quests for clothing for quests (overpriced items), you don’t even have to do any of this content?? It’s so annoying. I don’t want to come off as pretentious I just really agreed with your ideas and stemmed off from there! I’m no game pro but on paper the game design is bad. I’ve been of the firm Opinion that Auonoma has NO idea what he’s doing. The new Zelda game is proof of that, same formula AGAIN. It’s sickening But yeah they are fun games haha
Maybe as the director, aonuma wouldn't be as connected to the small shifts from title to title, therefore he became bored with what to him, felt like directing the same game over and over
I love all zelda games and i always loved oot and tw but totk and botw are simply better games overall and i did enjoyed em like a fucking drugs addict guy, old zelda is goated but new zelda its just better and i didint complain about the farming cus it felt soooooooo natural and smooth
People started sequence breaking Zelda games because they felt too constrained. Sequence breaking isn't freedom in video games like you're thinking about. It's freedom like escaping from prison is freedom. If the developers didn't intend for players to be able to do it, it's not comparable to BotW or TotK. Heck, even in BotW and TotK people have tried to sequence break, to varying degrees of success. A notable example is the (to my knowledge) still ongoing search for Great Plateau Escape and now Great Sky Island Escape. Specifically with TotK, Paraglider Skip is its own sequence break. I feel like the more sequence breaks exist in a game (in particular those that aren't viable for a speedrun), the more constraining the intended way to play is/has become. I think a notable example of that is A Link Between Worlds' Prologue Skip. You get into the Death Mountain area while still carrying the Level 1 sword as a delivery to trigger Ravio's Shop early. The only sequence breaks I feel people are looking for in BotW are Great Plateau Escape and Early Divine Beasts. Early Master Sword and Master Sword Trials Skip have already been found and optimized. I'm not too familiar with the speedrunning/glitch hunting/exploiting scene of TotK.
I look at the games as different genres, the labels I use you may not agree with, but what matters is that each group is a genre, and different from the other genres. These are the Zelda games, grouped by Genre: Top-Down Action Games: Four Sword Four Sword Adventures Triforce Heroes Hack and Slash RPG: Hyrule Warriors Age of Calamity Side Scrolling Action RPG Zelda 2: Adventure of Link Open World RPG: Breath of the Wild Tears of the Kingdom Adventure RPG (Zeldalike): Everything else LoZ, ALttP, OOT, MM, LA, OoA, OoS, MC, WW, TP, PH, ST, SS, ALbW. New Zelda isn't better or worse than old Zelda, it's a different genre, and so will have different fans. Some will like one, the other, both, or neither.
Zelda could stand a lot to learn from Elden Ring. The creator of the souls series looked at breath of the wild and took the idea of open world but did it in a way that completely retains the souls identity. Elden ring manages to offer the freedom and exploration of Botw and Totk while also having the legacy dungeons which are massive interconnected areas in the same style as the old souls dungeons. Zelda could very well do a similar thing and it would almost certainly make new and old fans happy
Back when BoTW came out, my friend would bring his switch to school and let me try it. I played for 5 mins and bailed. I feel so overwhelmed by the notion that you can do everything that I’d rather do nothing instead. Comparatively, I’ve played and completed WW and TP because they entice you in w/ the promise of adventure and deliver TEN FOLD. That’s how I feel anyway
One thing I will agree on (it's a complaint I've had for years myself) is that Nintendo never capitalized on the opportunity they gave themselves by giving players Link's entire kit at the beginning in Breath of the Wild. Where were the shrines that demonstrated how to use multiple runes in tandem to solve puzzles? Where were the puzzles in dungeons that called for use of multiple runes? They might as well have giving you Cryonis during the Vah Ruta Questline, Stasis during the Vah Medoh Questline, Remote Bombs during the Vah Rudania Questline, and Magnesis during the Vah Naboris Questline. At least then they'd have been able to tailor puzzles in said Divine Beasts around the rune you got in the area. Like they did with the Sage powers in TotK.
1:19 The "quarter heart" was in the game code; at least in the original LoZ, but it wasn't displayed. An example was: if you touched the gleeok's body, it would deal a quarter heart of damage. It would not show in the graphics except that two of these hits dealt a half heart.
With more IPs I like having to undergo that stupid obligatory -evolution- change, I'm becoming increasingly jealous of Dragon Quest fans... Why are *they* allowed to get ELEVEN frigging games and counting, on top of cool-looking spin-offs, with ZERO dumbasses going "eh, it's clearly growing stale because I said so"?! x) Meanwhile, I look at Paper Mario. We could have 6 of them by now (and with how revered TTYD is, that would be a big deal), but they stopped at 2, with the rest certainly not being an evolution. It's pretty miserable, too, unlike Zelda, there's only *ONE* Paper Mario-like I can think of, which actually feels like a new entry that's just missing the brand.
"Some people will just take this straight line all the way through the game-I forgot the straight line here" No you didn't, you subconsciously charted Wind Waker's progression
As a fellow Old Zelda fan, I stand by that BotW and TotK are indeed Zelda games. They are arguably closest to Miyamoto’s original vision of a game embodying open world exploration. That’s just my view based on interviews from over the year’s, but only Miyamoto and his fellow devs know what he considers core Zelda. That being said, imo, “Old Zelda” has been the standard for the series starting with ALttP and ending with SS. That’s a long damn time and has effectively become what Zelda is up until recently. And I agree that it was unique to this series, which is why it’s a shame Aonuma seems so anti-Old Zelda in recent interviews. I still have faith that a true new Old Zelda sill be released in the future. Nintendo imo has a great track record with handing off series to the younger generation who keep them alive and well. Hell, Aonuma was the new kid on the block in the 90’s with his first role in the Zelda series being director on OoT! If he can go from OoT to TotK, I believe that there will be plenty of change to come for the series and I don’t think that means furthering down this path of open world. But it’ll almost certainly be that for a while given the success of BotW and TotK.
Yeah, I think inevitably in like 15-20 years we will see a “throwback Zelda” because nostalgia always sells. Much like how they left the New Super Mario Bros style behind and harkened back to SMB3 with Super Mario Wonder. Just sucks I’ll have to wait that long.
@@WITAWITAVGI was literally about to comment this lol. It’s mostly a waiting game until old Zelda comes back. But in the meantime we have rumors of an Oot remake and Ww/Tp remasters, so Nintendo isn’t completely gutting linear Zelda at least
@@PixelPikminI just want twilight princess to get a proper hd version and not the half ass they did on wii u. Make the models less blocky, bring it to 60fps like they did for sshd, and make the textures and lighting beautiful. Twilight princess gets called the ugly badly aged zelda by wind waker fans but it's art direction is really amazing if it was actually respected and Remastered correctly
I had my first Zelda game back in 1998, Link’s Awaking for GBC and I was hooked on the series from that point. I played ever Zelda game from there onward and loved each one until TP. To me it just felt mediocre and did didnt have the same magic feel to it that the previous games did. Then SS came out and I played it but didn’t like it, then then it just got worse and worse to me, to the point where I dont even recognize the series anymore. Imo peak Zelda was from ALTTP - Minish Cap. After that it deviated so much that it completely alienated older fans like myself. And its sad to know that Nintendo will likely never make Zelda games like the 90’s/early 2000’s stuff ever again😢
I’m a new zelda fan getting into old zelda and honestly… i can now see why people miss old zelda. It feels comfy playing the old ones(i only played 5 zelda games so far and i am hooked.) i started with botw which is my favorite zelda game(mainly due to nostalgia) and then before totk released decided to play link to the past and it is probably my least favorite of the 5 i’ve played BUT i adore the game still which shows how great this series is. Then i decided to whip out the old new 3ds xl and buy me some 3ds games in 2024(shocking ik.) and bought oot 3d, mario 64 ds, and 2 pokemon games. I was shockingly HOOKED to oot 3d and the water temple ended up being one of my favorite dungeons in the whole series. Something about it feels comforting and then the final dungeon ended up being BETTER and MORE CLIMATIC than the totk ending.(i beat totk before oot 3d) which felt emotional but anti climactic as fuck compared to this ending. Now i’m only Minish cap which i love alot. It has my favorite graphics and it’s just especially fun to explore in this game and i just love the roll button and the overall layout of items compared to link to the past tbh. I’m moving onto Majora’s mask after this and if Nintendo doesn’t release windwaker or twilight princess hd on the switch emulation shall be my savior
I too am worried for the future of this series but I am more worried that for some reason you have encountered an insane person deciding to put bugles in brownies. I am sorry you had to experience that.
The TotK and BotW dungeons were pretty much the same, it's just that TotK's took a little more brain power. The objectives were the same, go to these four terminals, do the thing, yada yada yada. Twilight Princess is my personal favorite Zelda Game, and I agree that the Tears of Light segments were annoying. I think most Zelda's have a long annoying part, Skyward Sword is the beginning until Seal Temple. Majora's Mask, First Cycle. Wind Waker, Triforce Hunt. TP Tears of Light parts, etc.
Ill admit, I kinda miss old Zelda too. (Even though botw was my first Zelda game and all I played was that, took and skyward sword on the switch) BUT, if the old Zelda was ANYTHING like skyward sword, then I absolutely want old Zelda back even though totk is my favourite game of all time. #skywardswordisunderrated.
Zelda could work as an open world, merging linear dungeons that have a clear difficulty progression path(like Zelda 1) but can be taken on in any order with the open world and taking ideas from other open world games so your aren't just finding the same things over and over again. Also they could add dungeon items to the linear dungeons but just have them necessary to complete the dungeon but is just used to do something faster in the overworld that you could already do(like maybe a hookshot making climbing faster) but things like this are only possible if Nintendo puts any effort beyond a physics engine in these games. Also being able to go to the final boss at the beginning is fine but why am I told where he is? I should have to go out of my way to find the final boss at the beginning, also why am I told where the dungeons are? Why can't I just wander the world and find a hidden dungeon in a forest or something? Yea the exploration really needs some working on.
I had nothing wrong with Breath of the Wild I thought it was a pretty good game but Tears of the Kingdom on the other hand I'll never forgive Nintendo for that crap game!
My encouragement to find the secrets is the fact that I'm a perfectionist and cannot rest until I complete a game perfectly. I went through the hell required to get the Biggoron's Sword (fun fact: it was NOT, in fact, the genius idea I was expecting it to be to teleport with the Serenade of Water to Lake Hylia to deliver the Eyeball Frog. It was actually a _terrible_ idea,) one, so I could feel good tearing Ganon apart not having to use some tiny ass dagger, and two, I just couldn't handle leaving one singular stone unturned in the game. Leaving it incomplete. That would drive me... absolutely mad. (Though, even I have my limits. The Koroks... the damned Koroks...) Then again, not everyone has OCD or whatever the heck I have lol
I think it’s over for us. The money these new games make is insane. I just wish some indie series would come take the place of the old games. Tunic was really close for me.
I agree and yet in other ways I don’t. The thing is that it’s their choice what a Zelda game is. That doesn’t justify anything, of course, but still it is what it is. A great example of this is that obviously Skyrim and ESO are not in the spirit of old elder scrolls, and even flies in the face of their message and goals previously, but ultimately they chose what it was.
100% agree, Zelda is Zelda in name only now. Just not the same game anymore. Like if I want weapon breaking or open world I'll play Elder Scrolls, which Imo does both MUCH better. Didn't buy or play Botw or Totk, but from I've seen of them watching others play them it's just not the same anymore. I'm happy for those that loves this new direction but I'll done with the series if this's how it is now. Final Fantasy did something similar, everything's all action now. I miss the Snes and PS1 Final Fantasy Imo.
I honestly never got why weapon durability in BOTW was even criticized. When Jim Sterling first did it, it just sounded like they were crying over spilt milk. Like ohhh noo, your sword broke? Well, fuckin’, there’s another one over there you can just pick up, so… problem solved, I guess? Lol
@smaaron_j_46 But what if I like the weapon I was using? Shouldn't I be able to repair it like I can Elder Scrolls? If Nintendo is going to turn Zelda into a Elder Scrolls clone they should copy that too.
@@StarlightMirror it would’ve been a nice inclusion, but again, you could just pick another one of those up from spots you can normally find them. Like if you want another Royal Claymore, you could probably find it somewhere in the Hyrule and Akkala areas (Idk, I haven’t played BOTW in a while tbh). It’s cool if you’re not a fan of that, but I’m also the type to just work with what I got if it works well enough for me.
@smaaron_j_46 Thanks for being civil even though we don't agree. Most fans of new Zelda will bite off the heads of old Zelda and vice versa, I'm among the ones who is fine with whatever. Like if you like it more power to you, it's not my cup of tea though. Which's unfortunate, I really loved Zelda until they made all these changes. The series just isn't for me anymore, but it does mean I get to save my money for more Jrpg's instead now so I'm not complaining. XD
Gotta disagree with ya man, would've preferred BotW and TotK not existing. I hate seeing one of my favorite series getting absolutely butchered and deprived of what makes it itself. And don't get me started on all the squandered story potential. The stories of BotW and TotK are about 10 minutes long each, with the gameplay of each just being mindless filler.
I said much the same. I didn’t hate the game, i just hated it as a Zelda title. And i hate how ignored and shoved under the rug the arguments are. I even loved the game, just not as a zelda game. It felt nothing like a zelda. Even the biggest leaps in zelda have never been as big as they were over botw/totk and everything else save cd-i rom games. They were just not Zelda games.
Thanks for watching my vid y’all. I hope you stick around; I have videos on Super Mario Sunshine, Kirby, Ico, Final Fantasy and lots more! I’m looking to hit 3,000 subscribers before the end of summer, so if you could help me reach that goal by subbing and sharing this video, that would mean the world to me. Thank you again. Be good and spread love.
@Nonantement cap
If Nintendo had removed the Zelda branding from these games and released them as new IP would anyone have called them Zelda likes?
Of course not and they havent destroyed the Zelda franchise
@@dominikstute5810 If you’re saying they wouldn’t be called Zelda-likes without the name being attached, doesn’t that mean the identity of the series has been lost?
The only things that make BOTW and TOTK Zelda games are the main characters and location setting. The stories barley fit in with past Zelda games other than Gannon, and the sages. Various minor story elements, the names of characters, and the fact that it takes place in Hyrule are what make it Zelda. The actual gameplay does not feel like Zelda much at all.
i think so, though it depends on how much they would have changed about the games. Youd have to change a LOT about these titles for them to feel like a completely different series, and at that point the hypothetical doesnt even matter cause we're talking about a whole different game by that point. Yada yada yada, ship of theseus, yada yada yada.
@@LinkLink-wx5hhYou can make anything into any aesthetic. A sword could be a medieval steel blade or a cyberpunk laser stick. They're both short, swingable melee weapons. A gun could be a military hand cannon, a large squirt gun, or a bubbling witch cauldron. They're all ranged weapons that lob a large piece of ammo that causes splash aoe damage.
Apply this to concept to any game genre. Skins in games make it easy to see, but think of like Overwatch vs Paladins. Both are hero shooters. Mostly similar mechanics. One uses futuristic aesthetics, the other fantasy (with guns, but you shoot magic from a lantern, flaming sword beams, magic mirror laser along with crystal powered rifle, thrown daggers etc).
So art style and direction are up for debate. From a gameplay standpoint, they make a difference on mechanics and feel (Mario and Sonic both are platformers. Both play wildly different).
If you reskinned the open air Zelda games, you'd never mistake them as the Zelda genre.
That is the argument.
And frankly, I've played more than a few BotW "clones", and I think each one handles the concept better than the Zelda games. Not even stepping into IPs that actually were built for open world gaming in mind (see Elden Scrolls, or Witcher).
I just want a linear story in Zelda games again. One of my biggest gripes on new Zelda is how they made the story feel less connected due to you, the player, having to go out of your way to find context clues to piece together the entire narrative. And you don't even know which cutscenes are first, second, middle, or last.
I hate shrines. Every quest leads to a shrine. Everything in these new games leads to a shrine. I spend hours trying to do a quest and there is alot of build up to solving the quest and I get exited. Then I am rewarded…. With a shrine rising from the floor…. 😐
Facts. And in TOTK so many shrines just give the orb to you.
I don’t necessarily hate shrines I just wish they would’ve used other things as rewards. Shrines should’ve never been the only rewards
@@hyrumstephens2002 I think the biggest loss was the sense of being in a very special place. When I enter Forest Temple in OoT or Tower of The Gods in WW, it feels like a VERY unique and at one point sacred location. And plus, the fact that I know I won’t ever return to it in my playthrough makes my time there even more special. With a shrine it’s like “okay another one of these”. It doesn’t feel special.
@@WITAWITAVG I agree. I liked the idea of shrines. Almost like mini dungeons all over the map. But they could have made them more zelda feeling and offered cooler rewards. They looked ugly too
@@hyrumstephens2002 Maybe more variety. A shadow shrine, a spirit shrine, a water shrine, a special goron shrine, a one of a kind zonai shrine, maybe a shrine that takes you back to the past before the world was destroyed. Like just more variety and creativity. But still dont think they should be given as rewards for quests unless it is the continuation of a quest. (Hey my brother went inside that cave please save him. Then you go in and its actually like a shrine and you fight some monster and save him. Then you are rewarded with a new item, mask, outfit, weapon. Maybe like… a hookshot or somethin?. Idk. Not just a life container) but idk i just feel the new zeldas are alot less creative and much more predictable. Everything looks the same. Everything is solved the same way. All the dungeons and locations are boring. The music is boring. The bosses are mid. The quests, story, characters, cutscenes, everything basically… is boring 😐. And that was never the case before breath of the wild was a thing in the world of zelda… I was always exited for what comes next.
Each new 3d Zelda game after Wind Waker was made as a reaction to the previous game.
God I hope that means no building in the next one
Perfect video bro. You described a lot of what I love about old Zelda. I'm honestly depressed we probably won't get much of that anymore, since Aonuma has some sort of legitimate obsession with the "open air" aspect of modern Zelda.
Yeah. I can’t talk bad about Aonuma since he helped bring about so many of my favorite games of all time. But you can tell in the last 10+ years he’s really trying to move away from the traditional style.
I honestly don’t understand why people think tradition and formula are bad things for sequels. When you have to wait 4-6 years (oftentimes more) for a sequel, I WANT that comforting formula I enjoyed in previous games. This goes for most series not even just Zelda.
No, he has an obsession with profit, methinks. BotW and TotK together (in the amount of time they've existed: 7 years) have sold more copies together than every other Zelda game combined (in the amount of time THEY'VE existed... 1989-2024... 35 years)
It's obviously more profitable. But that's how everything goes nowadays, huh? Soulless cash-grabs.
I believe Zelda, the series as a whole’s game design philosophy before the BoTW era was best described as “emphasized player freedom within linear gameplay and story progression” IE: you have a destination, a dungeon that needs to be cleared, but how you clear that dungeon while linear does still allow for some player exploration and freedom. Enough to where unintended sequence breaks can occur.
Modern Zelda’s philosophy would best be summarized something like this, “player freedom with small moments of linearity and game progression” IE: no matter where you are or what you’re doing, unless it’s strictly guided you aren’t progressing the main story, this allows the player to do as they please without concern for plot progression, it’s part of the reason the stories in these two games haven’t exactly been stellar, because that isn’t the focus anymore.
I miss the old Zelda, straight from the 'Go Zelda
Chop up the ghouls Zelda, set on his goals Zelda
I hate the new Zelda, the bad mood Zelda
The always rude Zelda, spaz in the news Zelda
I miss the sweet Zelda, chop up the beats Zelda
I gotta to say at that time I liked to play Zelda
See I invented Zelda, it wasn't any Zeldas
And now I look and look around and there's so many Zeldas
I used to love Zelda, I used to love Zelda
I even had the green tunic, I thought I was Zelda
What if Zelda made a game about Zelda
Called "I Miss The Old Zelda " man that would be so Zelda
That's all it was Zelda, we still love Zelda
And I love you like Zelda loves Zelda
This gotta be my second verse!
The word "Zelda" now sounds like gibberish after reading it so many times in a row lol
I desperately need the Zelda team to play Portal and then be forced to play through their shrines to know how badly they missed the mark on both designing 'dungeons' and test chambers.
wait I'm confused. are you saying portal test chambers were good or bad?
@@staticwarrior Portal test chambers are good; the shrines are just test chambers but boring.
Yeah, cause they're not only short, 1-off puzzles, but they also can't build on each other like the Portal test chambers can. The only shrines that have an order are the first few being before all the rest, and maybe the last one only appearing after you did all the rest of them. There can be no gameplay progression or skill building with that. Sure, you can make some a little more complex, but outside of combat shrines, they all basically have to be playable as if they're the first one you found post-tutorial
@@Chronoflation Place the harder shrines in harder to reach locations, cluster shrines which build upon eachother, and let the player struggle if they haven't learned the prerequisite mechanics. Better yet, use dungeons to tutorialize puzzle complexity. Not everything needs to be instantaneous gratification.
@@Ianmar1 I agree it shouldn't be instantaneous gratification. The problem with clustering shrines is that when you go through them properly, it'll just make the games repetitiveness that much more obvious, and you'll still have the issue of not having the types of puzzles you learn to solve becoming more advanced throughout the whole game. Difficulty resets with each cluster. And then other times you'll just wind up doing them in the wrong order or otherwise just running to the wrong shrine.
I really don't see a way that they can do this in an open world format unless they lock shrines away behind game progression. For example, when you start, there could be only 20 shrines available. When you beat all or half those shrines, or maybe the first dungeon that tests the puzzle skills from those initial shrines, you'll unlock another batch of shrines. 20 or so per dungeon would ensure a regular pace of increased things to do, increased difficulty, etc. The problem is that this would make the dungeons be linear, and lord knows that Aonuma will not stand for FORCING players to engage with anything in his games in a specific order. And I'm sure Aonuma would never make 5+ versions of each of these dungeons for playing them in different orders. He barely makes mediocre single versions of each of his "dungeons" as is
I agree with much of what you say here. I miss old Zelda too and I was disappointed by TOTK treading the same ground and making some of the same mistakes that BOTW made. The thing that annoys me the most is the dungeons and the "Go activate the things to get to the boss". What happened to item progression in these games? That was one of the things that made Zelda great and now its gone.
I don't know why UA-cam recommended this video to me with under 400 views, especially since I've never heard of you before, but I am so glad it did. You have articulated my frustrations with the new Zelda games and my longing for old Zelda, and I agree with almost all of what you said. Thank you for this.
To give an example of what you said about new dungeon items unlocking more of the game and feeling like a reward, I think of a particular piece of heart in Link's Awakening.
In the Mysterious Forest, you can come across a room very early game with a chest across a gap, and across an even bigger gap, there is a piece of heart with some rocks near it. The first time you see this room, you know you can't get the rewards. But then you get the Roc's Feather, and you might think to go back there, but then realize you can't jump far enough to get the reward. But then later you get the Pegasus Boots, and you actually _can_ then get far enough to get the chest... but not far enough to get the piece of heart. So you leave again. And then eventually you get the hookshot, and you are _finally_ able to make it to the piece of heart.
And I feel like this room in the Mysterious Forest is a perfect encapsulation of the sort of thing you're talking about with old Zelda. We don't get this sort of situation in new Zelda, where you can solve every single puzzle the first time you run across it.
@@MuffinsAPlenty Yes!!! This is the “language” of the design I was talking about at the end of my video. It’s like a perfect mix of action-adventure, metroidvania, with a splash of RPG elements in there. It was so perfect and now it feels completely abandoned. Thank you for watching my video. I’ve officially gotten my UA-cam algorithm to start suggesting me smaller content creators, and I love finding them and supporting them. Thank you for doing the same for me :)
The final nail in the coffin in BotW for me was when I realized I needed a USB-C charger for the master sword.
They put limitations on the legendary sword that is known to fight the dark, and it has a charge..
Yeah that is extremely lame.
Yep, like the Master Sword should be the exception.
Yup
I don't know if this is a woosh moment but I don't understand what are people talking about in this comment
I actually think it's cool idea. It further emphasises the apocalyptic nature of the world that even the Master Sword has withered, and making it recharge overtime is still a good way to make it feel unique. Plus, still makes you to use different weapons.
Its just TOO nerfed to the point where it doesn't really feel special.
The new games would be better if weapons weren’t destroyed and instead determined your playstyle like elden ring. Bring back real dungeons, real towns, and a big overworld.
I agree I really miss the old Zelda. The dungeons, the companions everything 🥲… breath of the wild DOESNT hit the same
Same boat, I don't enjoy open world Zelda very much. In my case, Echoes has disappointed me since it's fronting like a traditional Zelda, but it's anything but. Desperately just wanted a classic game with Link with a back to basics focus after accepting 2D was the only way fans like me would be catered to. Then, even still, we aren't catered to, outright defied and given "open design" in 2D as well. The gameplay still reeks of that open, unrestricted find your own solution design. Rule of thumb is if a puzzle has dozens of solutions, then the problem presented can't be very steep to keep all solutions viable. I'll just stick to playing older titles from now on. Aonuma doesn't seem interested in making Zelda games anymore, at least as we knew them.
"Why would anyone ever want to go back to something more restrictive? Of course, I understand the argument, but people only think they enjoyed these games because of nostalgia."
-Aonuma, basically
what did you think about link between worlds?
@@Galamoth06 yep, fundamental misunderstanding of the appeal of those games. Despite being the brilliant mind that crafted them, unfortunate
@@vivilover9409 the best a Zelda game can be with the more free form approach. Though the dungeons did take a hit imo because they could only be certain you had one item at a time so they crafted the puzzles that way. Still much prefer titles that don't attempt the choose your own path style
I agree. I suppose with Aonuma's distaste with the old Zelda that we should look to new games and series that better scratch that itch. The tight, carefully crafted design of Metroid Prime Remastered made me feel like I was playing Twilight Princess for the first time again, and now I'm way more hyped for Metroid Prime 4 than any new Zelda they're coming out with these days
I agree with pretty much everything you said. Botw was fun, and i always thought that the sequel would be a new zelda game just using the same engine (like oot and mm). After the years of waiting, totk is the most disappointing game. Same map, same dungeon locations and objectives, same shrines, same korok seeds, same story telling, same combat, same weapons, same enemies. Only now you dont get to adeventure through the world you just teleport and fly everywhere. Its sad that aonuma thinks non-limited gameplay is always better. I stopped playing totk, but i remember when i was in the volcano dungeon i ended up using zonai devices to get to the thing, skipping all the minecart puzzle, and being sad because it seemed like it wouldve been a fun dungeon if the game didnt just let me skip it
I lobe both the new and old Zelda, but I want both of them and not just one of them to be produced.
6:20 NGL, I will probably be subbing to your channel for the inclusion of this music alone. Also doesn’t hurt you are 100% correct that new Zelda is basically an Erector Set dressed up in Zelda skin. I am still convinced BOTW was supposed to be a new IP that Nintendo was too afraid to give a chance to be its own thing so slapped some Zelda face paint on it and called it a day. It pains me to no end now when Aonuma basically says old Zelda is a relic of days past and the new formula is here to stay. New Zelda is missing pretty much everything that made the old Zelda, well Zelda (at least that is my opinion, but I am finding out more and more I’m not the only one who shares it).
I totally agree with you. I hate to say it, but I think the players deserve at least some of the blame here for slamming Spirit Tracks and Skyward Sword as hard as they did for being "too linear" or something. I think it caused Nintendo to reverse course for the next game that was already in the works, take ages to release the next game, and then finally put out something that feels like a single-player MMO or an unfinished beta near the end of the Wii U's life. Well, I guess now we don't get any games in the old formula now because all the creative, "make your own adventure" types who should be playing Minecraft or Skyrim have taken over our franchise and now we have nothing. :(
I do agree that it serves them right for dunking on Skyward Sword. Oh, you think it’s too linear? Here, you can have a game AND a sequel to it that aren’t linear at all 😂
Yeah seriously, I always liked SS, but the loud people crying about linearity, how about no more "linear" zelda ever again, now it's been 13 years and we don't get zelda anymore besides botw and totk(and link between worlds). (The 13 years before SS included OOT, MM, oracles, WW, minish cap, Twilight princess, and the ds games)
Indie spiritual successors are pretty much our only hope.
Golden axe warrior is a good zelda clone, though it's over 30 years old
I like Breath of the Wild but aside from fighting Lynels and pretending I'm playing a remake of Zelda 1, I stick to Skyrim for all my open worlding. still hasn't gotten old.
What does that make Totk in your eyes, genuine question question LMAO
I personally dislike they had a lot of irl time for how much they produced / new content we got
I am so happy that more and more people are making videos like this. I can’t stand what they did to Zelda. It isn’t even the same kind of game anymore. Modern Zelda should be treated like a spin off. Let’s get back on track Nintendo.
Rom Hackers are making better games than you are.
Put me on to some rom hacks! We old Zelda fans gotta speak up.
@@WITAWITAVG I just finished Ultimate Trial, Project Indigo, and Escape from the Facility in the past two weeks. It’s like I’m playing actual Zelda games.
Would have been cool if climbing was an item or a power you have to earn. Hook/claw/new concept shot would be cool too combined with the paraglider to glide fast.
As a super fan of a game like Mirror’s Edge, I will say that you can NEVER expect more of a game. The medium of gaming is brand new and far too fluid. Enjoy the game while it’s there, or don’t. That’s not to say don’t have opinions or criticize, but know that the trends will always change, and love what YOU love in games. Games are highly personal by nature, it’s YOUR experience that YOU play, but they are still made to be experienced and played by millions of people over the course of decades. They care about your experience, but don’t exactly place a lot of bets on replicating even moderate successes. You will see sort of similar trends until the trends move on or the need to reinvent/switch things up, and they do. I was a fallout fan in high school and I waited for that new single player fallout game after I played Fallout 4, and I’m still waiting today. Hasn’t happened. Gaming is a process of waiting for the thing, being pumped about the thing, experiencing the thing, and patiently waiting for/researching the next thing. It kind of sucks, but they haven’t really solved the problem. They create new one off designer drugs every few months, get us hooked, all before figuring out the supply chain…
Same man I miss the old Zelda. Modern Zelda killed the franchise. It’s all bland now
If the next big 3D one is another BOTW/TOTK style I might skip it. I actually put TOTK down for a few months before I eventually went back and beat it. It’s just not my style of game anymore. Echoes of Wisdom looks dope though!
@@WITAWITAVG indeed. I was tired of TOTK it all felt like a bloated mess and the shrines were repetitive I miss the dungeons. I beat the story and never went back collecting everything 100 percent. Yeah echoes of wisdom looks ok I’ll have to play it. Wish Nintendo remade the oracle games though that would’ve been mind blown lol
@@Zero-xl2ef me too. I want an Oracles remake with Link’s Awakening art style, but I don’t think they’ll do it because they’re Capcom games.
@@WITAWITAVG yup I doubt they’ll do it unless Capcom collabs lol. It’s all good though I still have them and I replay them a couple of times every year
@@WITAWITAVG I think they'll do it if they see profit in it. Nintendo has the money to outright buy all the rights to the oracles games from capcom, they just choose not to. The switch generation has been nothing but tunnel vision for the Zelda team ever since BoTW blew up, they aren't even creative any more because everything BoTW and ToTK does is done better in other open world games.
I noticed some Castlevania music in the background of your video. Noice.
Subterranean Hell, I think? From Dawn of Sorrow. At around 2:11...
Sorry I just really love that game so hearing a track in a LOZ video caught me by surprise 😮
An intellectual and happy man likes both Zeldas. 30 years of the old Zelda is plenty. Only thing i miss about old Zelda are the dungeons but the lightning temple is fucking goated. Crazy thumbnail though
Appreciate the thumbnail love! And yeah lightning temple was fire I gotta admit that.
@@WITAWITAVGdon’t listen to him, he’s a self proclaimed intellectual who’s insulting your opinion by suggesting your wrong for having it. A true midwit. The new games are good, but they aren’t Zelda. You’re correct.
Great video man! I think my problem with this is that instead of switching Zelda up from the at the time stale linear formula, they permanently abandoned it for a new formula. It’s fine to do a new idea every now and then, but they’ve completely abandoned what made Zelda ZELDA. No good dungeons, no unique scenarios, no story that actually takes place during the game,. And the staleness people claimed about the linear games is gonna happen to the open world games too, it’s already happening with Totk. Botw and Totk both start with Link waking up on a starting area where a ghost of a king guides him to 4 shrines with 4 new abilities, before being let loose into the world, where you can get memories to learn about the story and then go to the 4 corners of the world and interact with the 4 races to help them with a problem in their region. I think the better solution is to alternate between both styles, so after Totk we get a linear game and then after that an open game, so neither get stale. I love open world Zelda and linear Zelda even more, so I wish they could just coexist, even if linearity is just in the 2D games. Alas, I doubt that’ll happen, it seems linear Zelda is dead, with even the 2D Zelda games being open world games (EoW)
You put ALL and I mean ALL my thoughts and feelings about the current state of the Zelda series in one 15 minute video.
It sucks that new Zelda is so popular that companies made their knock off versions asap - that Ubisoft not-Kid Icarus game, Sonic Frontiers...even Oceanhorn changed from an old Zelda copycat to new Zelda
Nintendo is just too fixated on the idea of Zelda needing to be as open as possible. It does not need this. If instead of having one gigantic open world, we had first access to, say, 60% of the whole map, and freedom to explore and do things in any order, then we had some huge mid game plot-twist style event, and then that opened up the remaining 40%, with new items and exploring mechanics, all this followed by the endgame, then the games would, at least for me, get to that sweet spot between the amazing freedom of BOTW and the incredible pacing of Oot.
I'd call this "hierarchical open world" xD
This actually would be amazing
You’re so right. Instead of blending both styles, they ditched the linear style for a more open style. I garuntee a lot of us older Zelda fans would be satisfied if they did what you said, slightly downsizing the world and having actual dungeons, giving you more traversal opportunities
In short, you want A Link Between Worlds.
That's why it's the GOAT! THE GOAT!
Twilight Princess was linear but after the first few dungeons it opens up and let's you freely explore hyrule fields and do side content
And if u don't want to u don't have to because the game is straightforward about where to progress the story next
I think if they do an open world zelda again they just need to let the player explore some areas freely but the rest of the world will open up gradually the more you progress the story. It could work as an evolution of what older games did while being mostly like botw since that's their obvious direction
Yea I miss dungeons. I do not wanna play legos in Zelda.
I'll watch the video in the morning, but chiming in based only on the title...
I agree with the title. A big part of the Zelda franchise for me has long been storytelling, and the connectivity between the games. Both of which absolutely *suck* in New Zelda. Not only do BotW and TotK feel utterly disconnected from the rest of the games on the timeline outside of the fanservice references of costumes and area names, but TotK itself feels like a reboot of BotW - it's like BotW never happened. If you gave someone TotK to play first, they'd probably just think the few references to BotW were background information, not a whole other game.
And the open-world, do everything in your own order sucks as a storytelling system. As do the memories, especially finding them in the wrong order. I don't know what Aonuma was smoking when he tried to justify the lack of linearity with "technically, each player has a linear experience, it's the path they choose" - that is NOT what the people saying they prefer linear games mean. They want a story with a strong beginning, end and a linear sequence of plot beats on the way between them, not "go out into the world and meet back here after you've done for designed-as-if-they're-all-the-first-thing-you-do plotlines, and then we'll do the end". And every time I watch a memory I wish I was playing THAT game, instead of the one I am playing.
Side note, the music is also severely lacking. The OST for TotK was announced a few weeks back and I was absolutely DUMBFOUNDED by the fact it has more discs than the Kingdom Hearts 3 OST. I can only remember one track I consider good from each of BotW and TotK. If you asked me, I'd have said there's almost no music, especially nothing worth more than one disc. Whereas I remember the music from Zeldas past with fondness. (It's also worth noting the one track in TotK that made me hype was a rendition of a Wind Waker theme, so it's not even special to TotK - I won't be looking back fondly on TotK music in ten years like I did with Wind Waker, hearing that theme).
The puzzles also largely suck with such openness of design. I'm really worried about this new 2D Zelda game. The way he said players will have 'different solutions' for puzzles makes it sound as though there aren't actually any puzzles like in traditional Zeldas, merely obstacles to get around, and that's not as fun. Even the most frustrating puzzle in the Zelda series for me, in Phantom Hourglass, I fondly look back on as I remember the feeling of finally working out the answer without a guide, and annoyance at how long it took me given how simple it wound up being. I can't say I've had a similar experience in either of the last two games.
It's great people like the new games, I just wish they also did more traditional, smaller-scale bit still meaty Zelda games for those of us who like the old formula - and Echoes of Wisdom doesn't sound like it's gonna be it. I've gone from a day-one buyer to doubting I'll play any more of the games in the future.
How's that for "the grass is greener", Aonuma?
Also, what's the point in giving each player a different experience when everything feels so generic you can't just say "how did you beat X Shrine" without having to describe it with enough detail the other person knows wtf you're talking about. It's not like the old days where people were able to talk about specific dungeons and everyone knew what you were talking about. The most interesting things you could discuss about the new games with other people get lost in the sheer amount of it, and the fact most of it isn't immediately recognisable.
I forgot about quater heart damage... wow.
I personally play the new games like I would the old ones (it's not as good but I find it more satisfying) I basically try to limit myself like the old games would by only exploring places directly tied to the main story in the order I visit them, or if a side quest guides me there (doing shrines, exploring cave etc...). I leave the rest for post game !
I think the design mantra of "total player freedom" has been complete poison for the new Zelda games. The sad thing is that an actually good, modern Zelda that took inspiration from Zelda 1 would have been really exciting, but BotW failed miserably in that goal. Even though Zelda 1 was quite open in its design, it still limited you with regards to where you could go and there was a clear difficulty progression with the dungeons and late-game areas, even though some things could be done out of order. Zelda 1 was a great example of an open world with "Soft Linearity", the other examples being Dark Souls 1, Metroid Zero Mission and The Witness. BotW and TotK are just regular sandbox games.
It would have been really cool if BotW had proper dungeons (maybe their style being a mix of Zelda 1 and A Link to the Past), that the player has to find themselves in the overworld. Exploration should require skill and preparation. Too much of the level design geometry is trivialized with the sailcloth and climbing, making the traversal pretty samey across the whole game. The food and armor systems are pretty much broken and you will never die if you understand how they work. There is often no reason to engage with the enemy camps, and it's actively bad after the midgame, because they drain more of your resources than replenish them. I think the player should only be able to cook and change clothing in Stables, and you could only carry 4-5 cooked meals at a time. You should also only have checkpoints (like the bonfires in Dark Souls) at stables, towns, and certain camps, not an auto-save which saves constantly.
I wish this kind of 3D game, that truly understood the genius of Zelda 1's overworld and dungeon design and improved on it, will be made by some studio eventually, but I have zero faith in modern Nintendo ever making a game like that.
I really hope we can get a tri-force of sorts of zelda games from now on. Old 2D, old 3D & new 3D though I believe Eiji Aonuma said they're moving away from old 3D so☹️
I agree a few road blocks like in "link to past" would have been great middle ground. But i never got people complaining of pacing in an open world. The pace in 95% up to u. Dont like side quests, dont do they.... even with the food system u can bypass doing so many shrines if u dont want to. Great video 👍
yooo REALEST video on UA-cam just dropped?????
😎😎 had to drop some truth today.
I feel exactly the same.
You basically describe the same feelings I have with the series. For me BOTW and TOTK are good for... well, basically modern gamers. The type of people that think that every genre needs an open world and love running around empty vastness of nothingness and oogle at... well, actually nothing. I personally just like well crafted, interested and varied dungeons more. And the Items you get with it. Even the empty ocean of Wind Waker is more varied in its puzzles and uses as BOTW and TOTK together, which has 99% Korok Seeds of like... 5 puzzle varieties and the rest goes into the shrines. Which are a nice idea, but they still become boring, with all of them basically looking the exact same.
Also 100% agree on the feeling you achieved nothing until the 20 hour gameplay mark. Thats because you spent 99% of your time running from map marker to map marker. Makes me wonder why people hate UbiSoft games. Their map markers at least fill the map a lot more.
Nintendo has an "Innovation" Problem. They need to Innovate Every-Fucking-Thing, from Control Schemes taking Center Stage and Other Pointless Shit.
Yeah, how did "Innovation" work out for the Starfox Franchise, Nintendo?
Really these new games only needed small tweaks to progression (even though I want traditional items back)
1. Each completed shrine allows you to either level your stamina or hearts right then and there instead of saving up 4.
2. Rune/Arm abilities are previewed in the tutorial, but unlocked after certain Village-related quests are completed. Sprinting (Pegasus shoes), the Paraglider, and climbing (climber gloves) are available mid-game opening things up at the middle.
3. Memory/Tears have to be done in order. Narrative/story is by definition linear.
I was literally saying the same thing last night, that BotW and TotL are fantastic games, but not Zelda games by any stretch, and that they should have been their own unique IPs.
The open world has also really hurt the story and ever since twilight princess we haven’t gotten as many cinematic scenes as you would think by now. I miss caring about the story and it actually feeling developed
Twilight princess has a great story but the recent manga adaptation expands it even more in a really interesting way, I'd love to see that direction in a zelda game but they don't wanna take a risk by letting link speak or going back to a t rating. E10 max lol
i like both, i wanna see a mixture.
I guess the sad truth is... we are just growing up, and the franchise also did. And when we came to the realization that the formula was changing, it struck us so hard that we couldn't process the information. I was definetely excited for Breath of the Wild back in 2016, and while I bought the game in 2018, I refused to finish it. Sure, was happy that Tears of the Kingdom was coming when it was first announced in 2019 but, for some reason, I just wasn't excited. Till this day I have no reasons to buy the game, and while Echoes of Wisdom looks fun, I don't think I'll buy it. Guess that all that truly remains is yearning for the past. I can go to it, but it will not come back to me.
It’s a sad feeling. People like us are left behind.
It has nothing to do with getting older or the formula being "outdated". It has to do with them changing the entire genre of the IP to hit the mainstream open world market and abandoning the old one.
TotK lost Game of the Year to a turn based rpg. Remember that. Turn based rpgs are one of the oldest genre in gaming history.
@@amandaslough125
Never said it was "outdated", and I think this the "Old" formula still works if they try. God of War (2018) follows a similar formular and made big numbers in cash.
I understand that Nintendo wants to appeal to wider audiences, but that doesn't mean the have to get rid of the old style.
@@amandaslough125What's your point bringing up that ToTK lost to a turn based rpg?
why other people dislike new zelda: **200000 word video essay**
why i dislike new zelda: it's boring lol
Aonuma really does explicitly hate old Zelda. He's commented on it numerous times at this point and his obsession with "breaking conventions" is just a bullshit way of saying "I couldn't make my gimmicks in old Zelda sell, so now I made a mass appeal open world game and am forcing a Zelda skin onto it so I can do all the gimmicks I want and people will still buy it because it's a giant open-world game"
I was never an old Zelda fan, or a new Zelda fan
I am a Kirby enjoyer.
Honestly best answer
Well, you can suck me up and be granted my ability to get away with rampant tardiness at work, then.
Yeah, I super agree. Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom are great games and I love them, but they have a lot of flaws too. There are too many fetch quests. The shrines are kinda boring. The four main dungeons are boring just go hit these five switches then fight the boss quests. The non-linear gameplay makes it so you can get story beats in a really weird order, and it can feel like the whole game is spoiled because you found the most climactic revealing memory first. Because of the non-linear nature of the game the rewards and treasures for pretty much everything feel mediocre and not worth it. A lot of time getting the items you need for upgrades just feels like a grinding slog. There's too much empty space with nothing to do between important locations. I don't consider Koroks, random enemy encampments, or mediocre treasure as "something to do". Ok some of the shrine have interesting puzzles, but most of them are just too easy. I miss those days of old Zelda where I would be in the middle of a dungeon and get so confused because I was missing a key or something and had to solve some complicated puzzle.
Yeah every dungeon is “do these 4-5 things to unlock boss door”. It’s boring.
Ive played through every single one of them consecutivey throughout the years of release, and I think BOTW and TOTK are the best! They have so much more to do, and can hold my attention for a ridiculous amount of time. The older titles I can just speedrun through like nothing.
My first zelda game was botw and one of my favorites. i replay almost all the zelda games. and i wish nintendo would do new amd old becauce the new one is not doing it for me anymore. i has nothing to do with nostalgia
I feel like something changed after games like Skyrim came out and people didn't like Skyward Sword as much when it came out that games had to be these open world experiences, and japanese developers started feeling like western game philosophies were surpassing Japanese games and they tried to make Zelda feel like a more western game since Zelda is HUGE in the west. But japanese game philosophy has a little more.....nuance or handles how the user experiences the story EXACTLY how intended, and western games wanna focus on the player "creating their own story".
I really want to make a video called "How Xenoblade Chronicles ruined Breath of the Wild for me" because I know Monolith Soft worked on BOTW/TOTK and the big man upstairs STILL won't put NPC relationship trees and INTERESTING npc side quests in their OPEN world Zelda and I know they have it in them. Love hearing xenogears and tales of symphonia tracks in the video ❤
there are aspects of botw and tears that feel frustrating and lacking in comparison to the old Zelda, but I think they absolutely have a place in the series (perhaps botw more than tears tbh... but if we just view tears as a pure sequel then i think it fits). Hopefully in the future we'll find a real union of the old and new. It was such a disappointment that tears did not incorporate proper dungeons in the way we were hoping for
I don't like the new Zelda games either. I wish there were more Zelda likes. I have never played a game outside of the Zelda series that really managed to scratch the Zelda itch for me. The closest is actually an old game from the Gamecube era called Sphinx and the Cursed Mummy (it is also on Switch).
8:12 it genuinely is tedious game design for the sake of it. Totk forces you to go to the sky islands for sundelions, underground for zonite, farm food before fighting because why not, farm rupees and quests for clothing for quests (overpriced items), you don’t even have to do any of this content?? It’s so annoying. I don’t want to come off as pretentious I just really agreed with your ideas and stemmed off from there! I’m no game pro but on paper the game design is bad. I’ve been of the firm
Opinion that Auonoma has NO idea what he’s doing. The new Zelda game is proof of that, same formula AGAIN. It’s sickening
But yeah they are fun games haha
1 subscribe = 1 silver arrow lodged into Ganon’s silly blue face.
Your not alone, i hate the new open world Zelda too.
🏹 subbed.
Xenogears Music ftw
Maybe as the director, aonuma wouldn't be as connected to the small shifts from title to title, therefore he became bored with what to him, felt like directing the same game over and over
bros not the life of pablo
I love all zelda games and i always loved oot and tw but totk and botw are simply better games overall and i did enjoyed em like a fucking drugs addict guy, old zelda is goated but new zelda its just better and i didint complain about the farming cus it felt soooooooo natural and smooth
I love criticism bc it helps me understand what players want and what they don't want
People started sequence breaking Zelda games because they felt too constrained. Sequence breaking isn't freedom in video games like you're thinking about. It's freedom like escaping from prison is freedom. If the developers didn't intend for players to be able to do it, it's not comparable to BotW or TotK. Heck, even in BotW and TotK people have tried to sequence break, to varying degrees of success. A notable example is the (to my knowledge) still ongoing search for Great Plateau Escape and now Great Sky Island Escape. Specifically with TotK, Paraglider Skip is its own sequence break.
I feel like the more sequence breaks exist in a game (in particular those that aren't viable for a speedrun), the more constraining the intended way to play is/has become. I think a notable example of that is A Link Between Worlds' Prologue Skip. You get into the Death Mountain area while still carrying the Level 1 sword as a delivery to trigger Ravio's Shop early. The only sequence breaks I feel people are looking for in BotW are Great Plateau Escape and Early Divine Beasts. Early Master Sword and Master Sword Trials Skip have already been found and optimized. I'm not too familiar with the speedrunning/glitch hunting/exploiting scene of TotK.
I look at the games as different genres, the labels I use you may not agree with, but what matters is that each group is a genre, and different from the other genres.
These are the Zelda games, grouped by Genre:
Top-Down Action Games:
Four Sword
Four Sword Adventures
Triforce Heroes
Hack and Slash RPG:
Hyrule Warriors
Age of Calamity
Side Scrolling Action RPG
Zelda 2: Adventure of Link
Open World RPG:
Breath of the Wild
Tears of the Kingdom
Adventure RPG (Zeldalike):
Everything else
LoZ, ALttP, OOT, MM, LA, OoA, OoS,
MC, WW, TP, PH, ST, SS, ALbW.
New Zelda isn't better or worse than old Zelda, it's a different genre, and so will have different fans. Some will like one, the other, both, or neither.
Zelda could stand a lot to learn from Elden Ring. The creator of the souls series looked at breath of the wild and took the idea of open world but did it in a way that completely retains the souls identity. Elden ring manages to offer the freedom and exploration of Botw and Totk while also having the legacy dungeons which are massive interconnected areas in the same style as the old souls dungeons. Zelda could very well do a similar thing and it would almost certainly make new and old fans happy
Back when BoTW came out, my friend would bring his switch to school and let me try it. I played for 5 mins and bailed. I feel so overwhelmed by the notion that you can do everything that I’d rather do nothing instead. Comparatively, I’ve played and completed WW and TP because they entice you in w/ the promise of adventure and deliver TEN FOLD. That’s how I feel anyway
i agree with everything you said. new zelda has ruined zelda.
One thing I will agree on (it's a complaint I've had for years myself) is that Nintendo never capitalized on the opportunity they gave themselves by giving players Link's entire kit at the beginning in Breath of the Wild. Where were the shrines that demonstrated how to use multiple runes in tandem to solve puzzles? Where were the puzzles in dungeons that called for use of multiple runes? They might as well have giving you Cryonis during the Vah Ruta Questline, Stasis during the Vah Medoh Questline, Remote Bombs during the Vah Rudania Questline, and Magnesis during the Vah Naboris Questline. At least then they'd have been able to tailor puzzles in said Divine Beasts around the rune you got in the area. Like they did with the Sage powers in TotK.
1:19
The "quarter heart" was in the game code; at least in the original LoZ, but it wasn't displayed. An example was: if you touched the gleeok's body, it would deal a quarter heart of damage. It would not show in the graphics except that two of these hits dealt a half heart.
With more IPs I like having to undergo that stupid obligatory -evolution- change, I'm becoming increasingly jealous of Dragon Quest fans...
Why are *they* allowed to get ELEVEN frigging games and counting, on top of cool-looking spin-offs, with ZERO dumbasses going "eh, it's clearly growing stale because I said so"?! x)
Meanwhile, I look at Paper Mario. We could have 6 of them by now (and with how revered TTYD is, that would be a big deal), but they stopped at 2, with the rest certainly not being an evolution.
It's pretty miserable, too, unlike Zelda, there's only *ONE* Paper Mario-like I can think of, which actually feels like a new entry that's just missing the brand.
I just want dungeons man..
I 100% agree with you, it was my favorite licence before botw now i don’t think i will be buying the new games anymore
"Some people will just take this straight line all the way through the game-I forgot the straight line here"
No you didn't, you subconsciously charted Wind Waker's progression
As a fellow Old Zelda fan, I stand by that BotW and TotK are indeed Zelda games. They are arguably closest to Miyamoto’s original vision of a game embodying open world exploration. That’s just my view based on interviews from over the year’s, but only Miyamoto and his fellow devs know what he considers core Zelda.
That being said, imo, “Old Zelda” has been the standard for the series starting with ALttP and ending with SS. That’s a long damn time and has effectively become what Zelda is up until recently. And I agree that it was unique to this series, which is why it’s a shame Aonuma seems so anti-Old Zelda in recent interviews.
I still have faith that a true new Old Zelda sill be released in the future. Nintendo imo has a great track record with handing off series to the younger generation who keep them alive and well. Hell, Aonuma was the new kid on the block in the 90’s with his first role in the Zelda series being director on OoT! If he can go from OoT to TotK, I believe that there will be plenty of change to come for the series and I don’t think that means furthering down this path of open world. But it’ll almost certainly be that for a while given the success of BotW and TotK.
Yeah, I think inevitably in like 15-20 years we will see a “throwback Zelda” because nostalgia always sells. Much like how they left the New Super Mario Bros style behind and harkened back to SMB3 with Super Mario Wonder. Just sucks I’ll have to wait that long.
@@WITAWITAVGI was literally about to comment this lol. It’s mostly a waiting game until old Zelda comes back. But in the meantime we have rumors of an Oot remake and Ww/Tp remasters, so Nintendo isn’t completely gutting linear Zelda at least
@@PixelPikminI just want twilight princess to get a proper hd version and not the half ass they did on wii u. Make the models less blocky, bring it to 60fps like they did for sshd, and make the textures and lighting beautiful. Twilight princess gets called the ugly badly aged zelda by wind waker fans but it's art direction is really amazing if it was actually respected and Remastered correctly
I had my first Zelda game back in 1998, Link’s Awaking for GBC and I was hooked on the series from that point. I played ever Zelda game from there onward and loved each one until TP. To me it just felt mediocre and did didnt have the same magic feel to it that the previous games did. Then SS came out and I played it but didn’t like it, then then it just got worse and worse to me, to the point where I dont even recognize the series anymore.
Imo peak Zelda was from ALTTP - Minish Cap. After that it deviated so much that it completely alienated older fans like myself. And its sad to know that Nintendo will likely never make Zelda games like the 90’s/early 2000’s stuff ever again😢
I never liked that they re-used the shrine idea in Tears of the Kingdom.
Might've been faster to just say, "BotW and TotK are new Zelda, everything else is old."
I’m a new zelda fan getting into old zelda and honestly… i can now see why people miss old zelda. It feels comfy playing the old ones(i only played 5 zelda games so far and i am hooked.) i started with botw which is my favorite zelda game(mainly due to nostalgia) and then before totk released decided to play link to the past and it is probably my least favorite of the 5 i’ve played BUT i adore the game still which shows how great this series is. Then i decided to whip out the old new 3ds xl and buy me some 3ds games in 2024(shocking ik.) and bought oot 3d, mario 64 ds, and 2 pokemon games. I was shockingly HOOKED to oot 3d and the water temple ended up being one of my favorite dungeons in the whole series. Something about it feels comforting and then the final dungeon ended up being BETTER and MORE CLIMATIC than the totk ending.(i beat totk before oot 3d) which felt emotional but anti climactic as fuck compared to this ending. Now i’m only Minish cap which i love alot. It has my favorite graphics and it’s just especially fun to explore in this game and i just love the roll button and the overall layout of items compared to link to the past tbh. I’m moving onto Majora’s mask after this and if Nintendo doesn’t release windwaker or twilight princess hd on the switch emulation shall be my savior
I too am worried for the future of this series but I am more worried that for some reason you have encountered an insane person deciding to put bugles in brownies. I am sorry you had to experience that.
Nice, using tales of Symphonia music!
The TotK and BotW dungeons were pretty much the same, it's just that TotK's took a little more brain power. The objectives were the same, go to these four terminals, do the thing, yada yada yada.
Twilight Princess is my personal favorite Zelda Game, and I agree that the Tears of Light segments were annoying. I think most Zelda's have a long annoying part, Skyward Sword is the beginning until Seal Temple. Majora's Mask, First Cycle. Wind Waker, Triforce Hunt. TP Tears of Light parts, etc.
Ill admit, I kinda miss old Zelda too. (Even though botw was my first Zelda game and all I played was that, took and skyward sword on the switch) BUT, if the old Zelda was ANYTHING like skyward sword, then I absolutely want old Zelda back even though totk is my favourite game of all time. #skywardswordisunderrated.
That Ye remix was sick. Good shit 😂
How did you sum up my thoughts perfectly lol
Zelda could work as an open world, merging linear dungeons that have a clear difficulty progression path(like Zelda 1) but can be taken on in any order with the open world and taking ideas from other open world games so your aren't just finding the same things over and over again. Also they could add dungeon items to the linear dungeons but just have them necessary to complete the dungeon but is just used to do something faster in the overworld that you could already do(like maybe a hookshot making climbing faster) but things like this are only possible if Nintendo puts any effort beyond a physics engine in these games.
Also being able to go to the final boss at the beginning is fine but why am I told where he is? I should have to go out of my way to find the final boss at the beginning, also why am I told where the dungeons are? Why can't I just wander the world and find a hidden dungeon in a forest or something? Yea the exploration really needs some working on.
I had nothing wrong with Breath of the Wild I thought it was a pretty good game but Tears of the Kingdom on the other hand I'll never forgive Nintendo for that crap game!
My encouragement to find the secrets is the fact that I'm a perfectionist and cannot rest until I complete a game perfectly.
I went through the hell required to get the Biggoron's Sword (fun fact: it was NOT, in fact, the genius idea I was expecting it to be to teleport with the Serenade of Water to Lake Hylia to deliver the Eyeball Frog. It was actually a _terrible_ idea,) one, so I could feel good tearing Ganon apart not having to use some tiny ass dagger, and two, I just couldn't handle leaving one singular stone unturned in the game. Leaving it incomplete. That would drive me... absolutely mad. (Though, even I have my limits.
The Koroks... the damned Koroks...)
Then again, not everyone has OCD or whatever the heck I have lol
They better fix zelda bro I swear they can’t butcher my boy
I think it’s over for us. The money these new games make is insane. I just wish some indie series would come take the place of the old games. Tunic was really close for me.
@@WITAWITAVGBlue Fire is awesome too; its more movement and jump n run based, but has also some Zelda stuff in it
Nintendocaprisun!!! The OG!
fire flow at the end. good work
Same
I will not allow any Spirit Tracks slander. 10/10 masterpiece game
I agree and yet in other ways I don’t. The thing is that it’s their choice what a Zelda game is. That doesn’t justify anything, of course, but still it is what it is. A great example of this is that obviously Skyrim and ESO are not in the spirit of old elder scrolls, and even flies in the face of their message and goals previously, but ultimately they chose what it was.
100% agree, Zelda is Zelda in name only now. Just not the same game anymore. Like if I want weapon breaking or open world I'll play Elder Scrolls, which Imo does both MUCH better. Didn't buy or play Botw or Totk, but from I've seen of them watching others play them it's just not the same anymore. I'm happy for those that loves this new direction but I'll done with the series if this's how it is now.
Final Fantasy did something similar, everything's all action now. I miss the Snes and PS1 Final Fantasy Imo.
I honestly never got why weapon durability in BOTW was even criticized. When Jim Sterling first did it, it just sounded like they were crying over spilt milk. Like ohhh noo, your sword broke? Well, fuckin’, there’s another one over there you can just pick up, so… problem solved, I guess? Lol
@smaaron_j_46 But what if I like the weapon I was using? Shouldn't I be able to repair it like I can Elder Scrolls? If Nintendo is going to turn Zelda into a Elder Scrolls clone they should copy that too.
@@StarlightMirror it would’ve been a nice inclusion, but again, you could just pick another one of those up from spots you can normally find them. Like if you want another Royal Claymore, you could probably find it somewhere in the Hyrule and Akkala areas (Idk, I haven’t played BOTW in a while tbh). It’s cool if you’re not a fan of that, but I’m also the type to just work with what I got if it works well enough for me.
@smaaron_j_46 Thanks for being civil even though we don't agree. Most fans of new Zelda will bite off the heads of old Zelda and vice versa, I'm among the ones who is fine with whatever. Like if you like it more power to you, it's not my cup of tea though. Which's unfortunate, I really loved Zelda until they made all these changes. The series just isn't for me anymore, but it does mean I get to save my money for more Jrpg's instead now so I'm not complaining. XD
@@StarlightMirror it’s all good 👍🏻
Gotta disagree with ya man, would've preferred BotW and TotK not existing. I hate seeing one of my favorite series getting absolutely butchered and deprived of what makes it itself.
And don't get me started on all the squandered story potential. The stories of BotW and TotK are about 10 minutes long each, with the gameplay of each just being mindless filler.
I said much the same. I didn’t hate the game, i just hated it as a Zelda title. And i hate how ignored and shoved under the rug the arguments are. I even loved the game, just not as a zelda game. It felt nothing like a zelda. Even the biggest leaps in zelda have never been as big as they were over botw/totk and everything else save cd-i rom games. They were just not Zelda games.
I’m subscribing because this video was so good
@@vaati9364 Thank you!
@@WITAWITAVG no thank you!!
Alundra is the shyt btw. Probably in my top 3 ps1 games.
I have it. I gotta get further into it!