There are plenty of things to like about Tears of the Kingdom, and the first few play sessions you have with the game can be really enjoyable. But in a game as massive as this one - and with this much repetition - sooner or later it's going to hit you what a pointless waste of time it is. Tears of the Kingdom will be the game that killed open-world games.
Games featured:
The Legend of Zelda
A Link to the Past
Ocarina of Time
Majora's Mask
Twilight Princess
Breath of the Wild
Tears of the Kingdom
Shadow of the Colossus
The Last of Us Part I
The Last of Us (2013)
The Callisto Protocol
Timestamps:
0:00 - Intro
6:24 - Part One: Exploring
40:18 - Part Two: Shrines & Temples
54:21 - Part Three: Combat & Resources
1:22:00 - Conclusion
Putting only 4 short simple Temples on this 3 layers massive map is pure trolling to me.
totally. I ended up almost 100%-ing ToTK just to have a fully formed opinion. an INCREDIBLY bloated and recycled (BoTW) game. there are like 15%-20% parts of good/great fun among a sea of doing the exact same stuff 40 times, the exact same stuff I already did in BoTW 100 times. Depths suck. story is more ambitious, yet worse than BoTW. 6/10 game.
Like they looked at BOTW's critics talking about its sheer lack of dungeons, so they threw a couple piecemeal dungeons at our feet, expecting us to scramble to lap them up and worship them for it, despite after 17 years Link still can't move and swing a sword at the same time - the controls went backwards.
So true guys, so true... And I hate, that 90% of the people are still Not disappointed by this Copy& pasted dumpsterfire. Wrong feedback for Nintendo, bad future for zelda.
yeah it seems like there should be WAY MORE main missions
@@nillynush4899Exactly bro. Combat in TOTK/BOTW is seriously lacking. No Twilight Princess Hidden Skills or even run slashing just disappointed me. Its sad to see an 11 year old Link from WW and even OOT be a more competent fighter than an adult TOTK Link who cant even stab or swipe vertically.
The path to the Wind Temple was more memorable than the temple itself.
Maybe the real temple was all the path we trod along the way
The path leading up to every temple was more memorable than the temples themselves. Every temple in TOTK rank in the lowest tier of Zelda temples as a whole.
@@ilbroducciorenever thought of it like that
the path was so fucking awful :( the boss was great though but temple and path nah took me forever and i hated every minute of it haha
At least it was better than the water temple
“Open world” shouldn’t mean massive fucking map by default. We can have an open world game in a smaller map. It’s okay.
danm dude you trying to fill tokt's open world with your comments XD ?...
"A short hike" one of my fav openworld
Yep. Outer Wilds proves less can be more with a concisely designed world and story.
Gaping World is more fit to describe most of'em.
Yakuza games are good examples
If people react with "if you don't like it, then just skip it, it's optional" to every single aspect of the game, that just means "skip the game".
Literally how a lot of games are designed nowadays. Starfield especially. lol
I've grown so tired of the current "linear = bad" discourse. It seems like every developer has taken a page out of Ubisoft's playbook for the last five years or so.
Among gamers the "linear = bad" discourse seems more like a thing from 10 years ago. Developers still stick to it but I don't think that's because they genuinely believe in it, but because it makes games accessible to a wider audience.
It is much easier and cheaper to create an open world sandbox then to create a beautiful handcrafted map with an engaging story.
@@hubblebublumbubwub5215 I'm fairly certain the original meaning of the phrase was "linear world design = bad" or something to that effect, and it was almost definitely related to the massive praise dark souls 1 was getting for its world which was both nonlinear and 100% handcrafted
I keep going back to COD campaings consistenly, mainly cause they're pretty much linear and not that demanding
@@thaumlyno it was a general linear=bad And it was because of skyrim
Nintedo's recent run of "so much freedom" games feel more like flipping on God Mode. It's fun sometimes to turn on God Mode and go on a rampage, but it stops being fun when there are no stakes or challenges.
Like playing GTA with cheats, fun for a tiny bit, but ultimately unfulfilling and vacuous. The Legend of Zelda without its "Legendary adventure" quality isn't Zelda at all. Without a story or compelling companions or dungeons with unique puzzle items to play with... what's all the exploring really for? Without an epic story which Grips the audience members, what are the cutscenes ultimately for? TOTK has thankfully outed the shallow nature of it all, whereas BOTW wasn't allowed to be criticized for years. But TOTK is already waking a lot of people up to the problems others saw 7 years ago.
@@WeeG-bwc77yeah, we need to be sent on fetchquest through empty hallways again to get legendary items like a spinner that gets used for 5 minutes until it becomes utterly worthless.
I think nowadays there's a lot of underutilized fun to be found in restriction and simplicity. The original LoZ may not have been as restrictive as it was by choice, but it definitely knew that. When I "solved" a shrine with a rocket-shield for the fifth time in one playthrough, I started wondering "why bother?". If self-imposed restriction is the only way to keep the game fun... maybe the game wasn't very fun to begin with.
Exactly that, if you need to impose restrictions to make the game fun, that doesn't speak very highly of the game in question. Of course self imposed restrictions for difficulties sake (such as pokemon nuzlockes) are a separate category.
tears i feel like i have to use self imposed restrictions where it has this binary problem of being too trivial with zonai devices or too frustrating when depending on sneak strikes and heavily limiting bow usage. zelda 1 may have been pretty open but it had boundaries. there is that sense of satisfaction when you discover an alternate route or not realize a location can be accessed earlier either through a secret or even an unintuitive manner. alttp and oot were the only other entries that delivered on this style. for example, using bombos to get through the ice temple instead of the fire rod and then using the magic mirror to skip the hookshot gated room. misery mire and the pegasus boots instead of the hookshot or the navigational puzzle to skull woods without using the hookshot (in fact, the only time the hookshot is mandatory after the water dungeon is near the end of ganon's tower). oot had din's fire to get an early longshot in the water temple or epona to cross gerudo valley for the poacher's saw. i am still playing tears and i am going on a no glider run. i have to think outside of the box where some of the shrines i encountered so far that intend them do feel like kaizo challenges.
So you wasted Rockets on SHRINES of all things. I see where this is going.
@@Ephraim225 A rocket shield has multiple uses. Rockets are not THAT difficult to come by. You can just say you like the game in spite of the things I mentioned. Nobody is going to arrest you.
@@Ephraim225 no i used a bomb shield boost for one shrine. also i do not use rockets because i go for no damage runs throughout the shrines. one shrine i attached pieces of wood to extend a platform and use re-call to give me a close distance to jump across. also you cannot use zonai devices in your inventory unless already fused to shields and weapons.
the shrine/temple issue in BotW and ToTK was solved in previous zelda games. They were called dungeons.
Sadly the Zelda team forgot how to make those. Please understand.
yeah its wild to me people find it fun to bline shrine lights or do some piss poor side quest for one
Plus good main story & good music.
@@robnhood1416 Totk story and music are good. The problem is how the story is told. Please don't tell me that you like Wind Waker and Skyward Sword stories.
@@tonkytc Wind Waker had an impactful story. Link's family is wholesome and the whole idea that this Link wasn't born as the chosen one, but got the respect of the gods by his own actions is great. The Royal Family and Kingdom of Hyrule is also presented in a more morally grey light thanks to that game's Ganondorf who was way more nuanced and interesting than the one from TotK who wasn't even the same in previous games, so much wasted potential. And Skyward Sword had Ghirahim, Groose and the best version of Zelda. Entertaining characters that all develop over time and all play into the story well. What did TotK do other than throw a bunch of new concepts at you that don't mesh well with the existing lore, but acts like it does. Sheikah tech who? Yeah, of course the Zonai did everything the Hylians did (founding Hyrule, building the Temple of Time,) but way before them for some reason. The Triforce? What's that? But look at these cool new stones that somehow never came up before, they're waaay stronger than the Triforce ever was since they can actually harm the Master Sword.... Idk man, the story would've been fine if they just made a new setting with a new sword and a new villain, then it wouldn't have clashed with the existing lore and people wouldn't complain. Or at least give some new background to this new Ganondorf's motivations and the Triforce's absence. And in general, the characters could be better characterized. There may be more than in old games but that only matters if they are actually good. The characters in TotK all feel kind of cookie-cutter, even moreso than in BotW, where at least Zelda herself was interestingly written.
Between the release of botw and totk I had two kids. My general feeling seeing this game was “I already spent 100 hours doing that, I don’t have time to do it again”
Lmfao woh me too. Funny
Yup same! The game did become a chore when it became clear to get zonai batteries you need zonaite etc. or korok seeds to get expansion. I pretty much stopped playing and never upgraded my armor past second level
You’re a bum lol
The shrines feels like a training to something that we will do around the map.... but in the overworld the puzzles are more simple than shrines.
That's a good point actually. It's like they're tutorials that never actually get applied to the game whatsoever, there's no payoff whatsoever
@@dudeman5303 It could have less shrines e more overworld puzzles.
I had this same thought as I was playing the game. There's a lot of shrines that introduce a neat idea and then they just end right when it feels like the tutorial is over. There are so many cool mechanics in TotK but it feels like none of them are used to their full potential.
Eh? I'm going to need examples on this one. Do you hold this as a consistent criticism of both BOTW and TOTK or just TOTK? Because I found the puzzles in TOTK's shrines to be way more ambitious than the ones in BOTW. Not only that, I found them considerably more challenging that the puzzles in the average Zelda game from the supposed "golden era".
@@ZerogunRivale I played more of TOTK so I'll stick to this one. I don't think there is a way to compare the puzzles from other games, just because it's a different aproach. I just wanted more puzzles in the overworld and less puzzlea with the same aesthetics in the background. The shrines for example could be more "natural Looking" to it.
I miss the linear games. Resident Evil 4 Remake was actually refreshing to me because for once it wasn’t open world
TotK should've just been a new game+ expansion as a DLC, not a full game.
👏🏾👏🏾👏🏾
What is odd to me is that many of the complaints I had in BOTW were both not addressed and exemplified by TOTK. I'm glad someone put many of the complaints I had in more eloquent words than I could, very good video.
I'm actually amazed at the sheer arrogance the Zelda team had to ignore basically 95% of Breath's criticisms simply because they knew the game would sell regardless. They were right too, which just makes it even worse.
@@pitshoster401they didn’t ignore you because they knew it would sell. They ignored you because even though you feel like it’s 95% of the criticism it’s only coming from about 10% of you weirdos in the playerbase. You’re critiques don’t matter when you’re in the minority fam
@@mookiestewart3776 "criticizing a game makes you a wierdo" Nintendo fanboys really are a blight.
@@pitshoster401 For most people the issues that were in BotW were adressed, they weren't adressed how some people wanted to be adressed, but they were adressed. Weapon durability wasn't a problem in of itself for most, the lack of reasons to engage in fights due to how durability and getting weapons was the issue and that was adressed perfectly, in Tears every fight is a net gain because every single enemy gives you resources that can be used to increase the power of weapons with Fuse, not only that but breaking weapons results in stronger "pristine" versions of those same weapons appearing in the Depths, which makes fighting always be rewarding in one way or another. Lack of linearity in the dungeons wasn't directly adressed, but there are sections in the game with the linearity and puzzles that older Zelda games had, not in the dungeons mind you, but in the process of getting into the dungeons, the Puzzles to get into the Zora and Gerudo dungeon specially. There are probably a lot of other examples but those 2 are the most premanent criticisms I saw when BotW came out.
@@mookiestewart3776in what way do you think this is an appropriate response? You're just pulling that out of your ass anyways
I just don't understand what the SIX YEARS were spent on...
I've seen a lot of people smarter than myself talk about how ultrahand is just mind-bogglingly impossible from a physics engine point of view, and it seems like that's the gist of what took THIS long to release I'm not super happy since that's not really why I play Zelda games, but it seems like that's the main reason for the wait
In unironically making the game too easy to cheese.
@@kkb_7267Mechanics can be fine and all but they forget story and new locations would've helped tremendously. Link going back in time with Zelda would've been better AND having Zelda as a companion.
@@kkb_7267 GMod had a better Version of "Ultrahand" a decade before Zelda...
@@ChichirumiruI was gonna say, didn’t valve already solve this lol
Weird little rule I've noticed in the last few years: Games that call themselves "Open World" or brag about their big open worlds tend to be empty soulless trash. Yet the games that actually have great open worlds like Dark Souls 1 or Link between worlds aren't even considered when people talk about open world games. Open world is the biggest red flag in gaming right now. Watch out: "We were to lazy to create an engaging world filled with content and an interesting story so we'll give you this auto generated wasteland instead. What? It's empty and boring? No... it is REALISTIC... Here is a Horse and fast travel so you don't have to waste your time with this trash :)"
The fact everyone uses fast travel really does prove how open worlds are just a waste of your time
It's not a waste of time, you can discover things along the way, like caves, hunt for food and things to mix elixers with, fight enemies and steal their treasure and weapons etc.
@@JAYJAYBEBE Ahh yes _Things_ I love to "discover" _Things_ . Too bad there aren't any interesting things to "discover" in this game, unlike in 90% of the other Zelda games... Caves are a waste of time since their loot is either some trash armor I'll never use(if you are lucky...) or a giant wall of breakable boulders just to waste your time, probably both... Hunt for food? My entire inventory is filled with food items, but the only ones that are actually worth the seconds it takes to pick them up are "hearty" food items. Elixiers are useless since the game is so laughably easy I had to handicap myself by wearing only the tutorial armor and only switching to the un-upgraded ice, heat and fire resistance armor when needed. It's a good thing the tutorial armor also happens to be the best looking armor set in this game I guess. Fighting enemies is punished by the game since it wastes your weapons while giving mostly worse weapons in return. What it does encourage is to cheese kill the enemies with bombs or ice arrows so you don't loose any valuables while still getting all the loot. And what "treasure" are they guarding exactly? Some gemstone I'll just sell to buy more arrows? The worst part is that you are literally immortal... You can NOT DIE in one hit, you will always stay at 1/4 heart and then you'll just heal up with your unending supply of healing items... The best part in BotW and TotK are the tutorials, after that it slowly just keeps getting worse and worse. I couldn't even be bothered to complete the fire and desert "temple", did only like 20 shrines, killed ganon and then sold the game. God, I really can not wait for Zelda Indigo to release...
The Breath of the Wild games just made me appreciate Ocarina of Time, Majoras Mask and Twilight Princess even more.
Straight up dude, so much more! I already loved them a lot, including alttp (and everyone likes to shit on it, but I love Zelda II as well, it gets way too much shit for being just different as a Zelda game - it definitely feels unfinished as a game in some ways to me but overall it's a fun game and not as difficult as people say is, it clicks with you after a while tbh. It's a lot like Castlevania II Simons quest and that's a great game too), they just all actually had something to say unlike botw or totk, in botw and totk its just so tacky how they execute the story. Zelda has to tell link he's the hero like 2000 times as if the game is actually so difficult we need a pep talk every cutscene, I just got so frustrated by the constant fucking beat down of the same thing over and over. This game basically just says "ur the hero dude be legendary" over and over as if that is somehow supposed to make me cry or some shit.
@@dudeman5303 I've played through the first several Zeldas multiple times, including doing randomizers for them because they were just that much fun. Combined, I've probably done over 100 playthroughs. I'm literally doing a run of the OOT/MM combo randomizer right now, having just gotten the Song of Time needed to explore the MM side. Meanwhile, I have done and will do exactly one playthrough of TotK. There is nothing in that TotK that I loved enough to justify the sheer slog in that game. In the time it would take me to do anything besides just speedrun to Ganondorf, which defeats the point of a Zelda game, I could have played through Z1, Z2, and LTTP, if not even more.
I love how you said botw game"s" lmao
and funnily enough, even though I don't love the open world style for the series, tears of the kingdom really elevates and makes me appreciate even breath of the wild so much more in retrospect. in spite of all the criticisms i have of it, you can tell there was a level of care and love put into every detail of that game that i just don't find in tears of the kingdom.
Same. I missed dungeons so much playing BOTW
Someone probably said this already in the comments somewhere, but, in Breath of the Wild at least, I figured out how Flurry Rush works pretty quickly. It's not random, it's just dumb. See, having it LOOK like you perfectly avoided an attack doesn't actually do anything, all that really matters is that you did the jump dodge while an enemy had an active attack hitbox somewhere near you. That's it. You can deftly dodge sword swipes all day and get nothing, but if you sidestep so it whiffs entirely, then jump when the attack is almost finished, you'll get it pretty much every time. I stress that this is the case in Breath of the Wild, because I feel like Flurry Rush was tweaked in Tears of the Kingdom somehow, and I never was able to figure it out this time. It seems like it mostly works the same way, but the timing windows are either more restrictive or just different, because I found it really inconsistent in this game even though in the previous game I got to the point where I could do it against 95% of all enemy attacks consistently.
Also it's a pointless mechanic. It's like witch time in Bayonetta except you can only do one thing, thus there's no gameplay.
What's especially disappointing about the game snatching the impact of Zelda's sacrfice away is that, out of so many big, long-running video game series, Zelda is probably one of the few that could've gotten away with making a permanent change to its world and characters. Every game in the series has a self-contained story, and aspects about worlds, characters, mechanics, lore, etc. change on a regular basis. They could've easily kept the consequences of Princess Zelda's choice intact while also being able to ignore them for the next Zelda since it'll likely take place in its own world. It's a rare opportunity to be able to literally have your cake and eat it too, and this one was unfortunately wasted.
they couldve just give us an open end on zelda, like hint at a possibility that she can turn back into a dragon but dont do it and just end on that or give us an zelda tp ending
(Long comment warning) The reveal about Zelda being the Light Dragon completely RUINED me and when she just turned back into a hylian through... ghost magic(?) it did feel kinda hollow. Of course I won't deny I was incredibly relieved by this, but in hindsight it does feel like a massive copout. I was thinking about a future without Zelda, how Link would cope with that, how we move on when someone we love just leaves so suddenly. I had an idea of a story in my head where he'd basically become Abby from TLoU 2. A jaded wreck of his former self, taking control of Hyrule as some sort of emperor. Hell bent on completely annihilating the Yiga Clan and everything it represents. Yeah this bit sounds like kinda trite grimdark fanfiction material but the point is I was thinking about what could be done. The numerous fanworks that theoretical ending would've supplied us with. The whole game's theme was moving on, the quest that embodies this theme the most (to the point that subtext basically becomes just text) is the Hateno Village quest. Almost everything was pointing towards Zelda being a part of that past.
Waaah waaah cry me a river
@@tsrenisI spent a lot of time between the reveal and beating the game and so for me there was a lot of time to process it and let it sink in so her actually coming back in the end was so happy
@@dynawesome To me it still feels like a bit of a cop out. Like magical ghost hand magically magics dragon into normal Zelda magically. I mean, the Triforce is an in-universe option that they could've brought back for that instead. Heck, I'd even be fine with Zelda being back if we had a postgame that would've been pretty cool. Imagine a postgame where we rebuild Hyrule, building is literally a part of the game. There are multiple ruins begging to be rebuilt and resettled.
I dont know when the games industry unitedly decided open world= better game but 🤷🏼♀️
The cynic in me thinks they actually decided open world = more marketable
Open-World + A lot of random shit for "content" = Better game
There's nothing wrong with it being open world it's how it was handled. They did the opposite of what they did with breath of the wild and made a grind game with no real payoffs
Well keep in mind open world=better was BOTW. Then TOTK came and suddenly linear world = better has become a thing. How quickly opinions change
As a child, I wished for expansive, open world games you could just explore and immerse yourself in... sort of a Monkey's Paw thing now in hindsight with how empty and boring all of them are. These days I much more appreciate focused and condensed experiences. Open world games would be much more enjoyable if the open world didn't also strive for such expansive landscapes to explore, if you were free to explore in a small world that always had something new and interesting instead of the Ctrl-C/Ctrl-V of the modern day "Open World." My feelings largely reflect your own: I too am done with open world games. If a game is described as expansive, open air/world or "endless" in some regard, I just avoid it now. Tears of the Kingdom was the last chance for me to love open world games again, I thought if anyone could do it, it would be Nintendo, but clearly they were too busy making "Nuts and Bolts" to focus on making interesting content that interacts with these new systems.
Well said - I agree on all counts. I've wondered myself whether I would have enjoyed this game more if I'd played it as a child. Maybe it would have captured my imagination better and I wouldn't have been as disappointed by the repetition? Anyway, I'm 100% done with open world games now - if Nintendo can't fix the genre's problems with six years of work then nobody will. Thanks for the thoughtful comment and I'm glad you found something to agree with in the video!
@@Erumoredoes that mean you won’t play the next Zelda game if it’s open world?
@@V1SalvoI definitely won't. Actually, I'll never buy Nintendo hardware again lol
They did fix it though? This game is outstanding, every other open world I can't play for more than an hour before I get bored... this game? I played 13 hours straight and was hooked the entire time, maybe Zelda just isn't for you, at least not anymore.
Agreed, the only interesting open world I like is that of Bowser's Fury, which goes to show that making a smaller world might just be the solution.
The truly ironic thing is that Nintendo really did not need to go this far with the freedom. It was an over correction from Skyward Sword which was so strictly linear and handholdy that it may as well have just been a guided tour through a museum or aquarium. Link to the Past and Ocarina of Time both allowed you to do dungeons in different orders once you did the first three dungeons, and they did it without sacrificing world design or story or filling the game with bloat. Hell, even Wind Waker opened up the entire world to you once you completed the first three dungeons. I think Breath of the Wild was a great game, but Tears of the Kingdom proved that its formula does not hold up well beyond it. The problem is these games are SO free and with SO many options that it makes the games feel not like something that's a hand crafted experience but a sandbox demo where you're thrown into a big place with lots of tools and told to go screw around. It has its appeal, but it gets old eventually.
Yup. "Linear vs non-linear" is a false dichotomy. In-between is where the interesting stuff happens, from Banjo Kazooie to Dark Souls.
dude omg- the sandbox comment...fucking YES!
Man when you described your first experience with the depths at 22:26 it made me jealous that I discovered them the "normal" way. Falling in by accident, surviving the fall, and needing to use your resourcefulness to discover how to light the place up and make your way through the dangers beneath is what video games should be all about. Another of a long list of missed opportunities in this game. Also, all very well articulated - subbed 👍
It just bothers me that we waited what? Four years? And it wasn't even on the level of Majora's Mask which was made in about a year.
6 years
@@hydra4114With only 4 years of development. Well 3 of you remove the year of debugging. 2 if you take into account the team was working on whatever new game with whatever great ideas while we were waiting for the last DLC release, and then the team saw fan videos abusing the physics engine and decided to use that as inspiration for a new game gimmick and forced the team to start over.
@@amandaslough125what are you talking about? totk started as dlc for botw and started development directly after champions ballad was released. That was 6 years ago, so about 5 and a half from when totk released. even if you take off the year of debugging (which I think is bullshit because that's still development time???) that means this game took 4 and a half years to develop. And keep in mind that they already had the characters, art style, gameplay, controls, ENTIRE MAP, etc, etc. 4 and half years for so much copy and pasting is ludicrous
@@colecube8251you are kinda doing a lot of assuming here man, it's not really know how many ideas they took from the breath of the wild dlc. The one year they spent debugging came after they already had finished developing everything in the game.
@@matmate5795 I'm not making any assumptions, you can google it. it's the first result if you search up "when did totk start development?" also... wdym? I'm not assuming that the game uses the same map, characters, etc... I mean... just look at it??? it clearly does what?? also, I know they spent a year to debug. but you don't know what they were actually doing during that time. I am assuming here, but I highly doubt they spent an entire year solely debugging the game. They could have been making new shrines, caves, koroks, side quests, etc. Aswell as tweaking how different things work. (this is just a theory. another possibility is that some devs debugged while others started work on a new game). regardless, they were still working on the game during that time, and we still had to wait during it, so I'm unsure of why it should be removed? but anyways no matter how you slice it, this game was developed in 4.5-5.5 years
What you said at the beginning here is borderline EXACTLY what I've discussed my biggest problem with this game is. You have this collection of systems, namely ultrahand, fuse, all the physics stuff, that are some of the most well constructed and mechanically sound versions of this type of stuff I've seen in a similar video game, all somehow working flawlessly on hardware that is going on 10 years old at this point. So there's all of this complex stuff, so much so that it can actually take quite a little bit of time at the beginning of the game to wrap your head around how exactly everything controls, because there are just so many possibilities with it, but its actual implementation is the MOST surface level utilizations of it. You can make mechs, play music, create a calculator, all of this crazy stuff possible, yet the game itself only ever asks you to "put these parts together in the most obvious way possible" in the case of a lot of shrines, or make the vehicle that is unequivocally the best solution anywhere on the map that you are over and over. It's kinda the same problem I have with allowing for multiple solutions in so strict a way that they do: it just makes it so you do the least time consuming one and best option every time, which is the ABSOLUTE OPOSSITE of encouraging the player to experiment and be creative with the mechanics. Especially considering there is a big crowd of people that enjoyed Botw not for the shrines or koroks, but because of the world, there will be a lot of people that just wanna get on with their journey and see no point in messing with a system that at the end of the day, is completely useless practically speaking. So then if you are a person who largely doesn't care about that, and just want to explore a cool new world, TOO BAD, it's the same world from before and every addition to it is just as meaningless as the ultrahand system. (I've got a lot of problems with the progression system as well, a lot of realizations I've come to after playing Tears, but I'll stop here.) It's just massively sad to me that this amazing system was seemingly wasted on a game where the developers seemed too scared to make the solutions anything other than the most simplistic thing ever.
All of the issues you're describing are present in BotW as well, but TotK somehow makes all of those problems worse which is.. just baffling.
I have always kind of felt this way, but it seemed like so many people gave this game raving reviews. I feels refreshing to have this kind of review.
It kinda blows my mind that some people don’t like this game, but that’s just my perspective on it. It is nice to see these kinds of reviews and see other perspectives on it.
@@KingdomHeart556 It's less that "people don't like it" more so that people don't think it's this unanimous 10/10 game that everyone was raving about when it first dropped. For me I still enjoyed it but overall I was disappointed. I hold Zelda releases to a high bar and almost every single game has met that. In fact, TOTK might be the only one that didn't.
@@NissanZaxima well yeah I can see that I definitely wouldn’t give it a 10/10 but I definitely enjoyed it
Because people will buy anything with Zelda or Mario on the cover, and they know it. Why try, people will eat it up and give it high reviews. :/
@@Goosewitdajuice317The old formula was getting stale. Twilight Princess was when I started feeling the series was getting that way. It was dated on arrival. SS delivered on feeling different to an extent but it was so linear. BotW was a \breath/ of fresh air.
When i imagined Sky Islands in Tears of the Kingdom, i intrigued myself with the idea that progressing in Tears would be going higher and higher into the sky, Ganon being in Hyrule Castle at the top of the world, where you would very quickly abandon the world below to rise to the heavens i wish we got that game
1:27:27 this sentence resonated with me HARD, Although i didnt finish the game because i eventually just got so BORED, everything just felt like a chore.
same, I got about 30 hours in and dropped it. the vapid gameplay, the tedious control setup and the piss-poor performance were all such a major turn off after having played gorgeous, buttery smooth 60fps masterpieces that weren't recursive, self-fellating reruns of BOTW
Dude same, I stopped at like my 80th or 90th shrine. I was like bruh what’s the point.
@@Doodoovessel Newsflash: you don't _need_ to do the full 150. That's the whole point. Plus 80 something is a _lot_ for someone who apparently hates the game. Hmm, odd. I hated Breath, I barely gave it 30 shrines before calling quits out of the sheer boredom, blueness and monotony and the fact I knew by my 2nd Beast all the 4 ''bosses'' were laughable, insipid blobs of gook. Sapped the gaming life out of me! Thank Goodness for Tears (but only after 7 long years!)
Same bro, i think the only open world games im gonna touch are Rockstar Games (GTA and Red Dead Redemption) because most open world games use the same stale formula (explore., grind, and repeat) i beated this game twice and pounded +80hrs and genuinely it was an amazing experience but sadly most open world games are designed to be played once and drop, they lack replay value due to the massive bloated and filler content it doest feel fun to do it many times, like this game hit me like a truck cause i felt so disappointed due to massive anticipation i had, like i can replay any old zelda game thanks to the linearity, amazing content quality and among other things.
@@doomslayer8985 Ok, at least you have sense (and actual Good taste) in that you _did_ enjoy Tears. So, you're one of the (few) more sensible critiques here. However: I disagree about replayability. For me sandbox games are designed to be _more_ replayable. I've played nearly all the linear classics like Thief 2/3 , Mass Effect 2 and Alien Isolation: and compared to say Tears & Oblivion, they just don't 'hold up' as well long term however Great they were.
You're one of the few I've seen speak about how limiting the inventory would result in a better game. I feel both BotW and TotK would be far better games if you could only bring a small amount of items with you. Let's say you choose a loadout in stables, but once you go out in the wild you are left with your choices. A few weapons, a few shields, a few meals and a few consumables. Heck, I'd even extend that to the armors. Link's most OP ability is his unlimited size pocket.
i have not upgraded my inventory in tears and while the stealthing is frustrating for sneak strikes, i do feel like i have to manage my resources and not depend on powerful weapons. this actually makes weaker weapons have a purpose because you don't want to waste a savage lynel bow on an enemy that is taken out in one hit. the stronger weapons should be reserved only for tougher enemies. bows in both games are also pretty broken.
Honestly, they should’ve just copied Bethesda and every other main RPG game and have like a chest that you could drop off all your items in at your house also, the whole breakable weapon things always so stupid
@@Faceplay2 well link's house does have the weapon display rooms you can build.
@@chaosprime1629 yeah like space for like five weapons. It’s total bullshit. There’s a reason why every other video game RPG under the sun does a chest. What are my biggest problems with breath of the wild in tears of the kingdom is breakable weapons because then it doesn’t fill worth it to go find them, when I find a new weapon in the Witcher or Skyrim, Fallout, Dragon’s dogma or literally any other RPG game that’s like ever come out in the past 25 years. It feels worth it going out in completing a quest to get a cool weapon or item TOTK needed that. Heck, they could’ve had a side quest that allows you to unlock the master cycle again. Of to get the horse saddle that allow you to teleport your horse anywhere.
@@Faceplay2 i miss the ancient bridle and saddle. the cycle zero was removed because of autobuild being a thing. the problem i see with durability is no counter and also weapons feeling too good to use especially when long throw is a gold skill. tears also has the issue of being very grindy for materials and too much rng from weapon bonuses. i noticed most entries fujibayashi worked on are guilty of one of these two features.
I ENTIRELY grew tired of gloom hands and phantom ganons. First encounter - crazy. Best moment of the entire game. Every subsequent encounter exponentially diminished my enjoyment of them to the point of hatred. They’re in all the mazes, in the overworld, in the depths, so when I completed the deku tree quest and found that the thing I had to do was just kill another phantom ganon it was such a letdown. Not to mention there’s a point in the story where you fight like 15 of them, which is cool, but maybe if I’d seen them once before, not after having fought dozens. And the final boss first form is literally phantom ganon.
The most frustrating thing about all this is that with BotW and TotK the Zelda series became "just another" open world game, with the same tropes and things to do that are in all the other games on the market. But tell me one more game like legacy 3D Zelda that isn't the nearly 20 year old Okami.
I honestly couldn't. It's a type of game that is essentially dead now and that really sucks.
I'm relieved to see that I'm not the only one who has been sorely missing legacy Zelda, and who has been looking for something to fill that void. Closest I've gotten is Okami and to a lesser extent elements of the Soulsbourne games. I never really got the complaint that 3D Zelda gameplay was stale, I loved Skyward Sword and it's dungeons for what it was. While I enjoy BOTW and its sequel, I really miss dedicated dungeons and the sense of progression legacy zelda had.
The inventory being a problem can be proven with two words: Eventide Island. It was the highlight of the previous game, and led to the most interesting shrines in totk. In general I think inventories lead to worse gameplay in most games, but it's particularly bad in the recent Zelda ones because there is so much opportunity for creative problem solving that gets ruined by leaning on the same few premade solutions.
It's interesting that a lot of the issues you pointed out apply beyond TOTK, especially to Starfield. In general, modern gaming is in a rut.
Even starfield has more to do with npc interactions and worldbuilding than TOTK. That’s the problem. Bethesda rinses and repeats and does better than an innovator attempting to revolutionize open world gaming.
Play indie games, bro. AAA studios are a lost cause.
@@FutaYuuta I honestly kinda hope this is satire. Indie games have gotta be the most oversaturated “dead horse but beaten sevenfold” class of entertainment out there. They recycle the same concepts over and over and over but get a pass for it because of some slight variation. I think indie is the future but before I can fully support that notion I need indie developers to stop doing metroidvanias either open end exploration and insane boss difficulty/topdown game driven by visual and narrative storytelling about childhood trauma.
@strictnine5684 Finally! Someone else said it. The indies has literaly the same problem AAA games have. But because it is a ''passion project'' so they can get a pass with another metroidvania but this time it is not insects but animals WOW! Such innovation! Or another "hard to discuss" muh trauma story games. Gaming as a whole is rotting not JUST AAA games only.
@@emptyorchestra It’s a reflection of the degraded state of our society and culture.
You probably often get "so you got 20 hours of enjoyable gameplay, what's the issue?" The thing about game is, you can't just account for quality time spent. How you ultimately evaluate it, how much it sticks in your memory (positively, or leaving a sour note), is also an important consideration. You also need to account for: what is the intended (length of) experience of a title? For TOTK, it's clearly more than 20 hours. The thing needs to be regarded more holistically.
28:29 is such a big one for me. While I absolutely love the clothing mechanic from an aesthetic and roleplaying point of view, it's discombobulating to me that hardly anyone seems bothered by the pretty lame scenario of "Oh, the game says it's gotten a bit cold now, gotta open up the menu, find the clothing set that I need and now the whole situation is trivial." People hated the Water Temple in Ocarina for this exact reason, to the point that even Nintendo fixed the problem in the 3DS-remake. But that at least had a tangible gameplay factor: Without the Iron Boots, you couldn't dive as deep as you had to. In BotW and TotK, it's literally just "Yeah, you COULD still get to where you need to be, but it's a bit harder now, because... reasons. So change your clothes on the spot." It's not a major issue, it's just surprising to me that people are somehow okay with it here. And I agree, permanent upgrades would have been cooler. In fact, I imagine it would have been fun if Link gets more and more permanent accessories over the course of the game (like the Goron's Bracelet and the Titan's Mitt) so he starts out bland but by the end of the game, he's adorned by all this stuff that makes him look like a proper hero with a tough journey behind him that steeled him for all challenges. I hope they do that in the next game!
It's the difference between someone asking you a question every few hours, versus someone asking you one every five minutes. When done sparingly it's tolerable, hardly worthy of note even, but when done constantly it's a pain in the ass. When you equip an outfit in BotW/TotK you manage your inventory screen once and then you are free to wander the climate. At worst you're in the desert and you need to change your outfit sparingly with the time of day. Aside from defensive values you're never punished for not changing back when you leave either. Iron Boots however needed to be taken on and off constantly in order to navigate the water temple, made so much worse every time you make a mistake and have to renavigate parts of the dungeon, and keeping them equipped punished your movement speed.
@@WolforNuva That's a good point and I get that the iron boots _were_ more annoying, but changing clothes being _less_ annoying doesn't really make it a good gameplay mechanic either. And like I said, the iron boots had a tangible function, allowing you to explore a part of the game that you couldn't before and with how the Zora's mask worked in MM, the whole thing actually became pretty fun and a skill you could learn. In BotW/TotK it's merely just "hey, this icon on your screen says it's cold, but nothing else changed. Put on some clothes." I just think these would have worked better as permanent, passive upgrades (aka why can't I wear cool earrings and a cool hat at the same time??)
@@MrFoxIncI wasn't saying it was a good mechanic, just that it's very mild compared to the iron boots, and that's probably why not so many people are up in arms about clothing while iron boots are infamous. And yeah I think the passive upgrade idea would have worked out well too. I do miss seeing little items build up on the core character as you progress, not many games seem to do that anymore.
Thank you so much for speaking this to a wider audience. This is what’s killing modern game design: Lack of challenge and filler content. My disappointment with BOTW is what made me notice this issue and not play TOTK. Out of my ~40 hours with BOTW I realized only the first 10 were spent doing something substantial while the rest were just walking through an empty land and collecting pointless stuff. All the advertisement consisted on “You see that mountain over there? You can go there”. You indeed CAN go there but turns out there’s nothing to do. At most there’s an arbitrary Korok seed or an easy shrine that doesn’t test your skills or intelligence. So what’s the point of making and advertising such a big empty map? Wasting the player’s time. After those first hours of discovery BOTW gets utterly boring and doesn’t challenge you whatsoever. Just repaint enemies with bigger healthbars and continue exploring with dull music. I know it has already been said a lot of times, but indie games fill the void that AAA games have done. A game doesn’t need to be a high budget spectacle in order to be good. In fact, it’s better if it DOESN’T do that. They feel more like movies than anything else now. Games need to be challenging, cut the filler and get straight to the point. It’s no wonder mainstream audience doesn’t find games fun anymore. They judge quality by how many hours it takes to beat it, and not by substance of your actions. You’re transforming gaming into a chore to feel you got your money’s worth. It isn’t just micro transactions and unfinished products, gaming isn’t fun anymore because their bloated design now is inherently anti fun. Everything I play is either retro or smaller scale games that understand this issue, and to me it’s still as fun as ever. And having more niche audiences allow them to take more risks with new creative ideas. I’m not personally a huge fan of classic Zelda, but it’s sad to see that it turned into… this. Give me Wind Waker any day over this snoozefest.
You're absolutely right. Ive been saying that for a while now. The purpose behind the things to do in the world are non-existent. And even the set things to do in said world is limited. Nintendo has no excuse woth how big they made it and how much time on their hands that had to make either game. So disappointing.
It was the same for me. I already disliked BotW and was bored to no end (didn't finish it, however I spent a few more hours than you and finished 3 Divine Beasts and uncovered the entire map) that I made the educated decision to not invest time and money into TotK. And the reviews I've seen so far prove my initial intuition. Even hardcore Fans of BotW, like Bandit, are not satisfied with TotK, which I find ironic because they are now complaining about the exact same things I've already been complaining about in BotW.
i completely agree with you! the first 10 hours of my botw playthrough were fun as i explored and discovered new things. however the next 20 hours were terrible as i slowly realised i had already seen everything, the only things left were awful korok seeds in variations of the same 6 puzzles, mind numbing shrines, busywork like opening the menu and changing to a different clothes, enemies i had already seen and huge, plain mountains with nothing on them! the sad part is that TOTK could have been amazing if they didnt add sky islands or depths, and instead populated the map with FUN interesting dungeons, new terrain, well-designed actual gaming experiences and characters with stories and depth. im tempted to do what youve done and try indie games from now on instead.
I'm done with open world games too. I feel there's an inherent flaw about trying to make a gigantic circle into a worthwhile gaming experience. Never before have I seen so many games suffer from the same problems, it's clear to me that developers can't work around the demands of an open world game. The space itself is a huge mechanic and no one has figured out how to use that to their advantage. It's sad, because the immersion aspect is so strong people keep giving these games a chance and they convince themselves they're playing a great game, but what they mostly do is be mesmerized by the beatiful vistas. Vistas are nice, but behind those vistas, a better yet smaller game could exist.
This is one of the best descriptions of how I feel about the boom of open world games their shortcomings.
I got pretty worn out from tears of the kingdom too, but I think the genre itself can still be worthwhile. Xenoblade X is my favorite open world game as it feels like it doesn't suffer from the overwhelming size like this game and open worlds in general do
exactly right , we're trying to play video games here not watch interactive movies.....
I think my last dip in open world will be the Elden Ring DLC
Literally every open world game I've ever played felt like the developers were desperately struggling to justify the existence of that open world, and imo failing.
this entire thing can be summed up as Quality is more important than quantity, and I definitely agree.
When I first played, and was still enamored with ToTK, one tool I was super excited for was the Autobuilder: in my mind, the Autobuilder would completely change the way I played, making the world even more interesting and engaging. I was half right. firstly, as mentioned in this video - traversal is completely trivialized, but honestly, it's even worse than that. Exploration for me generally came down to marking areas of interest, autobuilding a fan-bike, and just flying to the marked areas. And why would I ever do anything different? Even aware as I was of how much this was taking away from the game... it was impossible to seperate the hoverbike from exploration, because exploring *without* the hoverbike felt tedious when I was traveling in almost any other way. In the depths? Just toss a light bloom on the front, and the darkness isn't even a factor. Surface? nothing is out of reach. Sky islands? assuming you have a few batteries, you can fly from the ground to any island. The only time you need anything other than two fans and a control switch to get anywhere are when an area is too narrow to navigate with the bike, or when you have to carry something with you. And then you can just make a bigger fan bike. But Autobuilder also broke combat for me. not through contraptions, which were often expensive and not super effective against silver enemies with 700 billion hp. No, what broke combat for me was a simple trick of sticking two puff shrooms together, saving them to autobuilder, and then dropping them in literally any fight that wasn't a boss or a mini boss (or a lynal, which is totally a miniboss but it doesn't have a boss health bar for some reason). Or a like-like, but they're already so simplistic that it's not necessary. I would find an 8-fold katana with high base damage and attach a lynal horn to it for like, 72 damage before sneak attacks, drop a puff shroom (or autobuild them if I was out) and backstab everything for instant kills against even silver boss bokoblins. And why would I ever do anything else? With resources being... well, not rare, but weapon durability was a thing, so I didn't want to waste then in long fights against silver enemies, who became the standard, with reds and blues almost not even existing any more. As for the Lynal horn... I never had any reason to replace it, because as soon as I got the message that my weapon was about to break, I would just go get that goron kid to remove it. Because of this, I virtually stopped running out of materials. The only downside to playing this way was zonite resources - but that was barely an issue. 10 minutes in the depths was enough to get back up to 200 zonite or more. So... you know, trivialized.
I'm on board with a lot of the criticisms in this comment section but this comment just comes off like you went out of your way to make things boring for yourself and are now complaining about it.
I'm a huge Zelda fan, but I can't wait for Baldur's Gate 3 to absolutely shred Tears of the Kingdom at the Game Awards.
It’s crazy how I spent 200+ hours on this game and grew tired of every gameplay loop, and there were pros you talked about in this video that I just never got to even experience through no fault of my own.
it's crazy how people playing 200+ hours might make anything boring. trust me, after a while try going back. it's what I did. i quit TOTK to play Elden ring and when i came back everything felt fresh again. playing the same game for 200+ hours is CRAZY, especialy if you don't play other games in between. variety is the opposite of bordom
I think you missed the point here. I was saying that I played it for 200+ hours, and I still managed to miss a lot of the positives this guy found in the game. My issue is that the content is very diluted. You have to sift through a lot of pointless or repetitive gameplay if you wanna see all the cool shit in the game, and you'll end up getting bored before you get to experience all the stuff they added because the game doesn't really value the player's time. Breaking it up is a good idea aside from that though, just wasn't the point I was making. @@kittenfan7664
@@kittenfan7664 I played 80 hours of Totk over the summer and quit once I had finished the main quest. I tried returning to it yesterday, beat 1 shrine and was immediately bored.
Open world games kinda killed my enjoyment of gaming for a while. I've only just started having fun again after shaking things up and playing Sekiro, which I enjoyed much more than its younger brother elden ring. For me, linear story-driven experiences are the way to go.
You do you then. Over *20 million* people think Open-world and Tears is the way forwards. But you stick to your corridors.
@@netweed09what's your problem? Depp
@@jogymogy3691 ? I didn't ask for your input, I was just stating a fact against his weird rant about Elden ring then prefering linear games on a (trash) opinion video over an Open World Zelda game. Go figure.
But no one asked for your input either.
@@netweed09I prefer a linear game without much side content so then side content doesn't end up being a bunch of boss resuse
God, I hope you're right about Nintendo learning a lesson about scale and quality over quantity based on the criticisms of this game. Something tells me they won't though...
I can only hope they decide to make Zelda in 3 styles going forward. The 2D entries, the linear and limited 3D entries a la Ocarina, and the massive open-world 3D entries. Unfortunately, as they haven't made any actually new games in 2D or 3D and only remade/remastered those other types, I'm not sure
They have stated this is the new direction for Zelda going forward, I love traditional Zelda but it was time for a change.
@@ash8244They stated after BotW it was the new Zelda direction but after TotK there was a comment that was a bit more vague on exactly what the rest of the direction next will be.
@@ash8244 We haven't had a new traditional Zelda since 2013. Traditional IS a change at this point.
@@ash8244 I know, and given their post-TotK commentary, I am very scared for the future of this franchise. saying shit like puzzles with single solutions are old game design and who'd want to play that anymore is a fucking abysmal mindset. Aonuma effectively called every prior Zelda antiquated when most are genuinely timeless experiences. Not so for BotW and Tears. Heck, there are things that both do better than the other that makes the other one less fun to play after experiencing it, like having the ability to stock up on different arrow types instead of fusing for every single shot you fire is something BotW has over TotK. Fusion is awesome but so cumbersomely implemented, it creates a lot of UI issues for a number of players that takes away from the experience, not to mention how broken some of the "puzzles" are. Most aren't even puzzles. Genuinely, if they make another game in this style without making even a classic 2D style game, I hope it crashes and burns so that Aonuma can learn that everything he and the Zelda team made before BotW wasn't actually antiquated and not fun like he made it sound like he thinks. I'm genuinely happy Zelda finally found mass appeal, but hearing Aonuma talk about it feels like the soul has been ripped from the series, and hearing the disappointment in so much of the Zelda lore KZhead community has really just hit the nail on the head with how I feel for so much of it too.
I never finished BotW... When I was young I 100% OoT and Majora's, something about those games kept me going til the end and further but BotW formula just didn't fully hook me.. I found myself wandering around fields. It's an amazing, beautiful zelda game that's fun to play but something was missing for me and Tears will continue this feeling most likely. Literally the dungeons are missing so maybe that's it but maybe something deeper. I will beat Calamity Ganon someday but will not feel same as beating water temple, or killing bongo-bongo, or getting all the masks.
Because Oot and Majora focused on what Oot established as gameplay, while Majora tweaked bad improved on it, adding in the gimmicky Masks, but did not fully take up the main appeal, as the environment was fleshed out in so far as how characters, enemies and specific regions were connected or related to each other. And not solely making a certain mechanic it's main appeal/attraction for the sake of a pretty poor Zelda game.
''Literally the dungeons are missing so maybe that's it but'' ~ ? What are you talking about?? Tears of the Kingdom had *4 Dungeons.* 5 really; one which was done in a very unique way. I dunno _what_ game you played, was it Breath again?! But nope, when Nintendo try and be different; people moan. Moan and moan. Boring. Broken record. Oh well - at least *20 million others* didn't, lol.
@netweed09 Aesthetically, they appear to be dungeons in TotK. Mechanically…..they’re very similar to the divine beasts just without the ability to have some form of control over it. Based on their comment of the Water Temple, they seem to be comparing what was in BotW and TotK to older temples that had potentially longer/linear/more complex puzzles.
same, characters in MM especially encouraged me to finish the game. I think BOTW and TOTK shouldve done was ALBW did, where it’s a open world to an extent with a lot of work done to make its puzzles a bit less simple and more enjoyable.
@@netweed09TOTK dungeons are just Divine Beast reskins. No way you play through the Wind Temple in TOTK and find the puzzles to be similar to the ones in WW’s Wind Temple.
I've never had a problem with getting consistent flurry rushes, for me the problem is that they make combat trivial. Like if you're fighting a Lynel, you just wait for it to approach with an attack, dodge, flurry rush, rinse and repeat. Same with bullet time. My Gleeok fights were just jumping off a rock, bullet time some arrows, rinse and repeat. If bullet time wasn't a thing I would actually have to avoid attacks while shooting my arrows and won't have as much time to aim which would make combat more difficult and interesting.
Zelda is trying to be what it’s not. Although ToTK had a technically very impressive physics engine with the ultra hand and fuse abilities specifically, it’s just not Zelda. I don’t play Zelda games to build vehicles and do crazy shit like that. I play Zelda games because I enjoy story based puzzle games, like every 3D entry before BoTW. It’s like they’re trying to appeal to an audience that doesn’t like what Zelda games have been traditionally, instead of appealing (at least mostly) to the audience who likes Zelda games. No offense, but I don’t want Zelda games to appeal to people who like big open worlds where they can build a monster truck shaped space shuttle. If you like those types of games, that’s awesome, but don’t ruin my Zelda games to appeal to a separate audience. I am completely fine with the idea of the Zelda series evolving. Frankly, Zelda games would lend very well to a big open world because older games almost tried to do that in a way, without having the capabilities to do it fully. Wind Waker had a big open world with nonlinear gameplay, while still having a very good story and more linear/interesting dungeons. I’m all for open world Zelda games, but I just draw the line at all this extra bullshit they keep adding.
You're right about Breath and Tears not being aimed at Zelda fans. Just take note of how many nu-Zelda fans shit all over the games from before BotW. They were always intended to be "Zelda for people who hate Zelda" and thanks to their sales we are NEVER going back.
you, random stranger on the internet.....I like you and this comment slaps
Been with TLoZ since the start, but sadly it died for me with the release of BotW... Just disgusting to take an already established franchise and completely change the genre. They don't even try to compensate for the change in genre by still releasing real Zelda games... "What, you don't like our soulless empty open world? Go F yourself, because thats all you're gonna get!"
Two aspects you didnt mention but are also huge problems to me: 1) The game's flow is literally about farming several different microcurrencies. Like a gacha game. The depths are literally a mine for resources designed to watse your time. There is no meaningful gameplay. Its all a big hamster wheel to grind. 2) The entire weapon system is completely undermined by only having 3 weapon types. Any other differences are mostly irrelevant. On top of that 2 handed swords are an extremely bad and unfun weapon type, so really i only ended up trying to use 2 weapons. It makes the durability management gameplay flow feel very shallow.
The depths were so exciting to me because I love the adventure of spelunking in a dark and gloomy cave system but in this case it was so disappointing... Exploring felt tedious and there were no puzzle aspects or really anything interesting once you spent 15 minutes finding basically everything there was to find
Honestly, if the next Zelda game follows the same formula as BotW and TotK, I might skip it.
I already skipped TotK
I just can't do the menus and busywork, I feel like I make barely any progress when I play. I think I might just do the temples and beat it and move on.
It's always nice finding a critical video on this game, because I kinda hate it, and I felt like I was going crazy with all the unanimous praise. I'm happy for those who were able to enjoy it, but man I've never felt more alone with an opinion before. The reused overworld really ruined this game for me, and absolutely killed my drive to explore. I just felt so bored throughout most of my time with this, and the disappointment that came with that was so immeasurable. I never expected a Zelda game to burn me that bad. I don't know if I want to continue being a Zelda fan if this is a thing Nintendo keeps doing. That sucks so much, man. Anyway, good video. I didn't play enough to form as much of an opinion on a lot of this stuff as you, but I have a strong feeling I'd agree with most of what you said if I did.
Unfortunately Aonuma has said multiple times that Breath/Tears will be the new formula for Zelda going foward. Its over, Zelda is dead.
@@pitshoster401 I don't outright dislike the new Zelda formula. I think it can stand to bring back some elements of the older games, but I don't want them to stop making games in that style. My fear is that reusing overworlds is going to become a trend, which might mean I'd only like every other game from now on, and I don't think I want to be invested in this series anymore if that's the case. It still really sucks that the OoT formula seems to be dead. I get that people thought it got stale, but I also don't think Nintendo ever really tried to expand on it.
The part that really stings the most, is that it took 6-7 years to make TOTK, which is just a lackluster rehash. If they had used that same time we could have had or at least been close to a NEW Zelda game. 😢 Heck, re-use the engine if they want to save some work, but give us a new map, new versions of Link and Zelda, new mechanics, etc. What a wasted opportunity.
You aren't alone, I and others see the problems TotK had and it definitely doesn't deserve the praise or the 10/10 reviewers are giving it. Honestly, it looks as though Aonuma saw videos on KZhead where people were being silly and constructing cooky devices and said "We should do that" and yes as impressive as these mechanics are, was it wise to make it the meat n potatoes of the sequel? Hmm I would say no but that's subjective. Not only do I agree that this game was unnecessarily big but I wish the devs put time and thought into other aspects of the game like the story, the map, weapons, armor, NPCs, dungeons, controls, characters. Instead we got a disappointing half baked mess of a time waster. I don't know if I'm going to completely give up Zelda but these past two games have made me worry as to what's to come. When your game has a title with LEGEND in it, I want to go a grand adventure with an awesome story, not use my time and resources to build things like I'm playing minecraft and it holds no significance to the plot
If you think Zelda is dead, you were NEVER a Zelda fan and you should be ashamed to call yourself one.
Yea this is exactly how i feel. My main problem with this game is the lack of restriction. I wished totk would have combined botw with the older zelda games. Maybe next time
This game made me realize I’m kind of done with open world games for now. I liked Mario wonder because it was fun, has potential to have you hooked for hours collecting, and it had a short story.
I don't want open world games anymore either, but i don't think open world isn't the problem, but the resources required to make them good verses the target demographic who will stop playing after 6 hours means that openworld will never reach the potential we as consumers assume every open world game could potentially promise and result in copy pasting content
@@petercottantail7850 i can see that. I feel like the moment that devs are able to fill the world and actually put meaningful things inside of it than it will be awesome but TOTK really felt quite barren despite how “big” it is.
80 hours of my summer that I will never get back :/
54:07 The Yiga outfit can also be used to obtain their Earthquake technique from a different hideout, which I got a lot of personal millage out of (more than I reasonably should have, given how niche the ability is). It’s a unique ability that you get out of a small sidequest that you might not stumble accross. From then on, I kept wondering if there were other Yiga techniques you could obtain in the world… But sadly no.
fans of classic Zelda games 🤝🏻 BotW fans 🤝🏻 *hating Tears of the Kingdom*
Great video, although I disagree with your take on the "temples" (which they are refered to as, but serve in absolute no ways as actual temples) they are very lackluster, too easy and are devoid of any soul that any previous Zelda temples had. Not counting the Divine Beasts, which I don't count as temples, the TotK "temples" are ranked on the very bottom of the list compared to other Zelda temples. I may be rating them this low due to how disappointed I was when I found out there were temples, only to get scammed
I agree that the temples are still largely disappointing, and nowhere near as interesting as ones from older games in the series. My point in the video is mostly just that they're better than the shrines, which are truly terrible. If development time was diverted from the shrines to the temples, I think there would be some potential there at least. Thanks for the comment and I'm glad you enjoyed the video!
@@Erumore True, it would've been better if they had spend more time on developing bigger and more intricate temples and less time on the many shrines.
The build ups to the wind and fire temple were amazing though I think going up to the wind temple was pretty peak Zelda tbh
@@Jbswe lead up to the wind temple is easily one of the best parts yeah, so is the whole part before Spirit Temple (imo that whole quest is by far the best part of ToTK). too bad these great parts are only like 10-15% of the game imo and the rest ranks from fine to legit boring/grindy/repetitive
Hot take time: Divine Beasts > TOTK Temples. Not that either are very good, but while they both feature "touch all the nodes!" gameplay, Divine Beasts had the control mechanism of the Divine Beast to take into consideration as you navigated, which kept the classic Zelda feeling of the full dungeon feeling like a macro-puzzle unto itself. Just, in a different way. Something better suited to the game that BOTW was. (A game I really didn't like that much, just FYI. What can I say, TOTK got me running devil's advocate here.) Take out the control mechanism, and all you have are shrine puzzles glued to the same space... which is exactly what TOTK dungeons are. The Water Temple is the most obvious example of this. There's no continuity between the various puzzles. No greater elements to consider when navigating. It's just puzzles on platforms. My own list is Twilight Princess = Skyward Sword > Majora's Mask > Wind Waker > Ocarina of Time > BOTW > TOTK, as far as dungeon/puzzle quality goes. (No disrespect to Ocarina, just... its sequels *should* surpass it. And I think they did, at least until... you know.) Needless to say, the recent games are at the bottom of my list, too.
The problem with flurry rush is that the window for it is earlier than it feels like it should be. You would think that flurry rush is supposed to be a risk/reward choice where you try to dodge out of the way right as an attack would hit you. But you actually need to dodge right after the enemy STARTS their swing. This leads to there being practically no real risk if you know the correct timing, because if you dodge at almost the right time but miss the window for flurry rush, you're still going to dodge out of the way of the attack itself. So it ends up being practically no risk for huge reward. And then parrying is pretty much the opposite, with a way higher risk and next to no reward. If you parry too late, your shield is going to lose durability. If you parry too early, you're going get smacked in the face and take damage. So there's a decent risk when trying to execute a parry. But the reward for successfully parrying an enemy is stunning them for an extremely short amount of time, and MAYBE making them drop their weapon. This "reward" is made even worse when you realize that you can already stun enemies and make them drop their weapons by using electricity. Although, who needs any combat skills when you can just stock up on multi-shot lynel bows and spam headshots on every enemy using bullet-time?
Nah the window for it is just fine really. And it is that. Or right when it would hit you. No there is still a real risk, no...you may possibly get hit. No there is still risk for it. Not really, there is a good reward for it. If you parry too early you may not take damage and does parrying too late really use durability? Nah it's for long enough really and them dropping their weapon makes it even better. Not really as that does not work well against deflecting attacks especially beams which still deflects and negates potential damage done to you. That won't always work and is limited in use so combat skills is still needed.
Zero respect for the players time… this game begs 100s of hours of gameplay but manipulates you into getting it. It’s not 100 hours of new shit, it’s 10 hours of cool stuff and 90 hours trying and failing to find new shit. But because the core is actually good, it’s hard to accept how they squandered the games potential, so you replay the same menial chores over and over again in hopes that you get just one hit of novel content.
I don't know which game I had a tougher time finishing, botw or totk. I don't think I was ever as bored with games as I was with these 2. Deep as a puddle, the games.
i miss doing something and being rewarded with something special that i can use to complete more stuff to be rewarded with more stuff. Now is just oh 10 bombs for a glowing frog and maybe some arrows or a weapon thats gonna break with the second flurry rush you do. So boring
Wow, I agree with you on so many levels. I'm on the final tempel now. But I struggle motivating myself to finish the game. Right now the only thing i'm intrested in is getting to the end as fast as possible. The enjoyment in the mechanics themselves and the world exploration is just gone at this point. Which is weird because right now Genshin Impact is more fun to me that Totk.....Why though? Anyway you have said everything that needed to be said. I was fine with the size of BotW, it is big, but I did do everything (exept the korok seeds). Totk, feels really pointless after Botw, because going on another collectathon (especially for stuff that I already had in Botw) with an even longer to do list is just not respecting my time for a single player adventure. The grind feels like it should belong in a mmorpg not a Zelda game.
"Genshin impact is more fun than totk" Congrats you let everyone on the internet know your an idiot.
it's almost like these games aren't meant to be played to death. Also if you needed motivation at the time, i would say take a while without playing the game. it will be a lot more freash when you return.
@@kittenfan7664 I already finished the story, and now the game has been collecting dust for about 2 months. I have played nearly every Zelda game and 100% them as a tradition. Botw and Totk are the first Zelda games I did not enjoy enough to 100% Botw I did almost everything it was fun until I only had the Korok seeds left. But TotK no thanks I havent even done half of it (It bored me so quickly) and I just don't care about it anymore. And Certainly Botw and Totk are not games to replay for me due to their vastness/grindyness. Perhaps you'll understand my point when I say that Majora's Mask remains my favourite Zelda game to replay. I actually still remember every quest and storyline. It was dense with stuff to do, that all somehow felt meaningfull, and thoughtfull. Skyward sword, Windwaker etc.. all feel more meaningfull, the characters more interesting and fun. I can with absolute honesty say that TotK is the only Zelda game I've ever come to Dislike more and more over time. And the more I think about all the reasons why. The more I dislike it. It's not a bad game objectiviely, but ....... I'd rather do my taxes than play Totk.
@@Scarletcroft 100%ing these games was never intended. That's why half of the korok seeds do nothing, and you can't get full hearts and stamina. While everything is meaningful, it's meant for exploration. Getting so close to 100%ing BOTW probably negatively impacted your TOTK playthrough. I kinda knew the BOTW map but not enough to tell if certain things were always there
@@kittenfan7664 Exactly thats one of the many reasons why I don't like totk.Botw had the favour of being a new experience. I am someone that wants to finish the things I like. That is just a part of my personality and how I live my life. Single player games should be 100%able imo and not contain huge amounts of copy/paste content. The content needs to be meaningfull. With such a big world map how do you figure out what is meaningfull and what is not......what parts of the game is worth my time? in Totk I found alot of it just isn't worth a second of my time, due to having botw nearly 100% and therefore TotK added bareley anything meaningfull. Honestly not even the main plot was worth the effort in the end. The best thing I can say is that the Final battle against Ganondorf was the coolest thing about the game. Look I enjoyed Totk for about the first 10 hours and the last 30 minutes.. for such a big world...the rest of it was just more of the same. Besides me just being frustrated with the clunky building mechanics to the point of avoiding using it at all. If I where the next Zelda games I would be elated to not have a such a build mechanic ever again.
I think a main difference between past zelda games and totk/botw is passion. For example majoras mask (one of the best zelda games imo) was on a really short time limit so the devs didn’t have time to revise ideas or decide something wouldn’t be in the game, resulting in the devs full creative power being put into the game which turned out well, compared to totk where the devs had lots of time (which isn’t necessarily a bad thing) and many ideas got thrown out and edited, and they were under much pressure for the game to live up to botw which resulted in them copying botw formula to achieve this. another game, link’s awakening, was originally just a side project but ended up becoming an actual zelda game and you can see that, there are many mario enemies instead of traditional zelda enemies, and you can see the passion in the game. Now look at totk, everything is clean, polished, and nothing seems like anything anybody super passionate about zelda would make. My point is NOT that devs should be under pressure, but rather devs should be able to have more freedom so they can achieve full creative potential. Theres no point in trying to “redefine what zelda is” because zelda is already good, they should be focused on trying to make a good game, not a game that will sell well, but a game that is good.
I love that YT is suddenly recommending me smaller but excellent creators.
I think the biggest flaw is likely down to being able to do anything, at any time, in any order. It's TOO open world. This inevitably results in a design ethos that everything needs to be created as though it's the first time you'll ever encounter it and forbids complexity and progression. Most open world games partially solve this, by having a main storyline. You are forced to progress this to gain new abilities, so this means that they can introduce side content at appropriate times [like in a game with 100 side missions and 10 chapters you can add 10 side missions to the map per chapter and increase the complexity and difficulty accordingly.] Now, that isn't to say this system isn't without it's own flaws, as it still promotes the addition of busy work as most developers seem to think that they have to make as large a map as possible and then make it as dense as possible rather than making the map size fit the story and for side content to be just as unique as the main content. Quality over quantity is always better. The moment they decided to make a direct sequel, they effectively trapped themselves. I, personally, have no issue with asset reuse between sequels. I think totally unique stories can still be told within the exact same gameworld [with or without the addition of set dressing to visually alter the world between games,] but the story told by the games industry [and perhaps players] is that you have to have a new map and that it has to be bigger. If they had shrunk the map and made the content filling it much less cut and paste, the game would be vastly better.... but pre-release would have likely been attacked online and savaged in reviews..... most likely with the usual accusations of "this is just repackaged DLC."
One of the best RPGs of all time, Seiken Densetsu 3, figured out inventory back in the '90s; give the player a huge storage space for items but restrict what they can carry at any given time. It made each story beat more interesting because you had to prepare in advance and be conservative, or you may have to limp through a section with limited resources. And it made real-time item use less of a chore because your active menu was more streamlined. As another commentor said, TOTK should let you store items in a stable or at your house but only carry a certain number of items at a time. It would make those facilities more valuable, make the player more conscientious, and curtail the menu drudgery every time you want to fire an elemental arrow or grill a steak. Best part is that you can get to those storage locations basically whenever you want, but access is just inconvenient enough to incentive you to not abuse it.
I personally agree with you in principle about being able to spawn whatever you want to solve a problem being a detrimental issue with the game. But then at the same time, if you're searching for something hidden in a cave and have to cover a lot of ground, it's satisfying to decide whether you want to go fast or sort it out in another way. The size of the world can sometimes impact how you want to traverse it. The level of choice allows you to jump over possibly interesting encounters, or just miss them entirely due to not running the right way. Armor bonuses and changing instantaneously is pretty lame though and it was the same in BOTW. Gear handling in general was a slog instead of a joy. In classic Zelda games, you have the ability to change your sub weapon at will and it works great. But in BOTW/TOTK you can change your whole loadout instantly, but sifting through it is a mess. Breaking weapons are on a whole other level to the point where as a player you either love the mechanic or hate it. It's a unique mess of a game.
i would say the problem is not so much of the open world concept but more of how it is handled. believe it or not but the legend of zelda on the nes had boundaries and a structure. while its overworld was almost entirely open to explore, there were some obstacles such as needing information to know the path to the lost woods or the lost hill. 2 squares were completely blocked off by a dungeon item, one of which was a dungeon location itself. not every dungeon was available at the start of the game. 3 were open to complete in any order, one had an item check that could be found in a shop or dungeon, the latter of which was blocked off by a dungeon but still could be finished as the first dungeon despite not being recommend for its difficulty and having an item check (also found in a dungeon) for an optional yet very useful dungeon item. 2 dungeons were partially opened where you could get the dungeon item but could not reach the boss and one of which required an item from another dungeon and a shop to defeat it. 2 were completely blocked off unless you got specific dungeon items and the final dungeon was impossible to go beyond the 2 second room until the 8 dungeons before it had the triforce shards obtained. therefore, zelda 1 was a non linear but structured experience or what i call an open metroidvania. botw and tears of the kingdom go beyond that and decide to make it more like a sand box adventure which no other zelda entry before was like that. what i want to see in the future of zelda is to keep the open world but not the sand box design philosophy. there are boundaries and dungeon order is flexible but not everything is entirely open.
People who say that BotW is just like Zelda 1 don't know what they're talking about, and that includes Aonuma
@@pitshoster401 it definitely isn't outside of the artwork callback. zelda 1 was technically an open world gam but it was also like a metroidvania hybrid. the dungeons themselves while having their own identities were still interconnected in a way because of how they shared small keys and the items interacting with each other for navigational purposes. for example, the step ladder is needed for most of the later dungeons but that does not prevent you from entering to explore part of it to find a different item to unlock another dungeon such as level 7 which has a bomb upgrade. progression was a core structural theme but it was flexible. botw does have it but it is downplayed because of the weapon and cooking systems unless going for the master sword. stamina upgrades were not required but only acted as a capacity expansion. the divine beasts were only to weaken the final boss and to give powerful abilities that make the game even easier. scaling was also inconsistent because of how selective it is. ironically lynels had the most consistency out of it in botw where out of the 22 in normal mode, 3 remained static and one only scaled based on the progress of the divine beasts. if botw wanted to be like z1 it needed boundaries instead of just breaking everything. if anything it is more like tww but with more freedom and different mechanics but its overworld structure is very similar due to the lack of boundaries on the grid.
Aside from other things that I didn't like about TotK, the whole ultra hand, new arm mechanics doesn't really tie in with the theme of the game or story. Usually when something happens to the player/main character in a game and they acquire some kind of power or ability it connects with the story in some shape or fashion. Here? Gluing things together and "breaking the game" adds no substance. Rauru gives Link his own arm in order to save his life. Okay, does it have anything to do with the story? Uhm no, not really. You can make a penis wagon if that counts for anything. And I'm mad during an interview when asked how does the team feel about the criticism received from the depths and the lack of content, Aounuma and someone else said it was intentional because they figured players were going to occupy themselves. Excuse me? Y'all really just put an empty space of nothing and said "ahh f** it we don't know what to do, let them figure it out" how does this DLC expansion pack warrant the cost of $70?? It's ridiculous and I hope this isn't how Zelda is going to be for the future
I know what they could have done. Putting dungeons/temples there! More than 4 temples in an overworld that massive, in a Zelda game, may be a good ideas. ;) It may be the last Zelda I played! 102$ CAD for a diluded, recycled, feeling empty, frustating, disappointing game. They got too much positive press and start to get very lazy. I much prefer the water temple in Ocarina than the 4 platforms with 4 isolate puzzles they gave us here. This is Zelda, not Mario Galaxy. We got smart intricated structure design in the past for the dungeons. Places in which you can get lost needing spatial memory, backtracking etc. I was hopeful when finding the pyramid but the interior is still too simple. The first part is a linear path and after that, one huge high room with 3-4 rooms connected to it. It's too simple design. Temples are shrines disguised in temples. That game feels like a troll between what they didn't gave us and what is bullshit.
@@AnthonySigouinto some extent I do feel like the devs trolled us as players. I don't know why they thought it was a good idea to base a sequel around the goal of "breaking the game" but here we are. Not only do the new mechanics feel gimmicky but the story was completely lackluster. I really wanted to enjoy TotK, since BotW kind of left me underwhelmed. Unfortunately, I was more so disappointed than anything when playing this. TotK had so much potential to be great but sadly the devs only focused on one aspect of the game and left everything else as an afterthought. And it's more so sad that the majority of people are praising this and giving Nintendo the okie doke to continue this tedious mess. The negatives outweighed the positives for me and I'm in no hurry to return to Hyrule in this installment (if ever again). The only giddy highlight for me was hydrated Ganondorf looking like a snack🤭🥴🥴 so thank you devs for that at least
It does tie in with the theme of the game and the story with you using the arm of Rauru that Ganondorf cut off to fight him so in a way you are helping avenge Rauru. And here it does connect with the story in a shape and fashion. No it does, you are using the arm the first true king of hyrule used to help build Hyrule. Yes it does, again it's to help stop Ganondorf. I'm pretty sure that's not actually what they meant. Because it's a sequel not a dlc expansion pack. It isn't ridiculous.
@@AnthonySigouin There are more then 4 temples in the overworld. It isn't diluted, recycled, feeling empty, frustrating, or a disappointing game. Nah that positive press is deserved really and they ddin't start to get lazy. Nah the water temple is bad and this is more then just 4 platforms with 4 isolated puzzles. And we got that here too to a degree. It really isn't too simple arguably. That isn't all there is. It arguably isn't too simple design. No they aren't they are templs. No it doesn't feel like that and what they gave us isn't bullshit.
@@blackchickiedee7 They didn't base it around that they based it around the goal of being creative and pushing everything to its limits. They don't feel gimmicky and the story isn't lackluster. They didn't focus on one only aspect and everything else isn't a afterthought. It isn't as the praise is deserved really and this isn't a tedious mess. Ganondorf a snack? Ayo? 🤨📸🏳🌈
Previous 3D Zelda titles had absolutely no problem incorporating exploration and discovery into a fairly linear game. They could've fixed these issues by just making the map smaller instead of creating a bloated repetitive wasteland. That goes for every single open world game ever.
"When did Ocarina of Time ever encourage exploration? Most of the game is scripted. Egoraptor exposed this. Nostalgia bias
There are dozens of collectables that you would never find if you didn't wander, many of which can be found in the hidden grottos which aren't required to beat the game. Even while you're on a straightforward quest you're rewarded for combing an area rather than bee-lining objectives, even if it's just a funny NPC interaction. It doesn't encourage exploration to the same extent as the later games, sure, but that doesn't mean it doesn't want you to stray from the beaten path. You're assuming I haven't played the game in years but have you played it all?@@frogglen6350
@@frogglen6350 Try forming your own opinions instead of parroting Egoraptor
KZhead is trying to censor me because I speak the truth. You won't 100% the game without checking out every corner of Hyrule. Yeah it's a dated N64 game but adventure is at its core. You should play Ship of Harkinian, the 60 fps HD PC port, because the gameplay mostly holds up and it's a piece of gaming history. Egoraptor sounds like a stuck up nerd @@frogglen6350
I assumed that it was like the first game, and that by leaving the initial island in the sky I had completed the tutorial and could now go anywhere. I spent the next 10+ hours doing random shrines and coming up with absurd work arounds (see below) for things, the entire time genuinely thinking "this is so stupid, why did they remove the glider for a sequel based on verticality." I assumed it was like the new powers, and that the constructed vehicles were meant to be the substitute. I rewound an ice block up a slope of spikes so I could jump off it and then damage boost the rest of the way up, when the real solution was "there's an updraft and you glide across"
weapon durability is not better, if anything it's worse, because now instead of just breaking a weapon on a bokoblins face and picking up the one they dropped to continue smashing, you have to stop, get an unused weapon, fuse it with a material, then continue on. it's basically the exact same thing just more work, besides the fact that weapons breaking in 20 hits still isnt fun in any way, especially not fun when you can make utility tools that break using them for less than 10 seconds like the flashlight shield... this is a sidestep from a garbage system to an equally garbage system
the ganon hands are such cool enemy design but the way you beat them shows how utterly creatively bankrupt nintendo is. one of the higher sky islands that are hard to reach, you get a shrine that is a blessing shrine, and that shrine gives you a magic rod with a star fragment attached. that moment for me was so cool because i never thought about doing it, and i was thinking "maybe ganon is darkness, i can disperse the hands with light". nope. non of that. the solution instead is to use ice and freeze then in a big spinny move. which is doubly disappointing because if you let them surround you they leave an un-gloomed spot where you stand, and they take turn at grabbing you each, and you can flurry rush their grabs. UNFORTUNATELY NINTENDO IS BAD AT DESGINING GAMES because the targeting system cannot change targets. this would fit SO WELL into Link's courage role, to face the hands head on, and let them surround him and take them out one by one, but NOPE. you can't, because even though they take turns at grabbing you, you literally can't switch the targets to face them when they are getting their turn, they even do a little shake when they are about to grab. Nintendo needs to stop hiring ART people, and hire people who can make a fun game. Enough of immervise sountracks and stunning art styles, there is an actual GAME i want to play, not look at oh yeah also the star fragment staff is utter garbage it does nothing basically. it's a very short range flashlight... congrats whoever designed that, very impressive work what's your salary bruh
This is the main reason why I started to get bored with Chores of the Boredom before I even got off the Tutorial Island. All the basic mechanics from BotW (picking up a new weapon, firing an elemental arrow, crossing a river) now take forever because of the clunky UI and inventory scrolling that was added. Even finding Koroks went from "cool, a new seed" in BotW to "urgh, another five minutes of glueing crap together to create an ugly motorised wheelbarrow" in TotK (but at least a lot of the Korok Backpacker chores can be solved somewhat quickly by glueing the little buggers to your horse). Tripling the amount of world to explore counts for naught when the actual exploration is one big tedious exercise in menu navigating and patience. So far the most positive thing I can say about TotK is that it made me appreciate Skyward Sword a lot more, I guess that's quite impressive.
It is better, no it's better, which gets you better weapons and stuff and is fun. No it's something else and is a new function, except they take longer to break now, nah the weapons themselves are still fun and they last longer then 10 seconds including the flashlight shield. Not at all it's better now at least.
@@jUppers Not at all and they aren't creatively bankrupt. That really isn't disappointing at all. It isn't easy to flurry rush them at all though. Nintendo? The kings of game design examples are bad at designing games? Get real. It can change targets though. I mean...you can technically you just gotta be careful. You can do that or at the very least gotta still take em all down. They already have a LOT of people who can make a fun game, people used to criticize them and kinda still do for focusing on gameplay too much and not on other stuff like story. Yes and Totk is a actual game and it's not shit. No it isn't garbage and it does stuff. Eh it's useful.
@@jaydenc367dude either engage the points they made with actual arguments or just admit your blind.
I went through the exact same experience twice with BotW and TotK. Amazement and excitement, so much promise, things level out, tedium, boredom, when does it actually get fun instead of just promising it?
You make a good point about the game being better with less inventory. I previously did a "1 armor" run of BotW: once I put on a piece of clothing, I couldn't take it off. I ended up using 1 cold resistance (Rito hat), one burn resistance (goron pants), and the Zora Armor, which let me do 3 of the 4 Divine Beasts. By not engaging with the optional stealth+/climb+/speed+/attack+ outfits, I made more use of the meal system. Likewise, the game may be more interesting if you make a rule where you cannot heal while battle music is playing. Not sure how to fix the inventory problem. Having unique monster parts and all the additional fruits really adds to the game. Maybe have it be like Pokemon used to be, where you can only access your full inventory when you're in towns (or in Zelda's case, stables). Otherwise you have to choose your loadout of what to bring with you for each part of the game. Restricting non-monetary items to 99 instead of 999 would also probably encourage more experimentation and item use. Likewise, reducing the number of weapons/bows/shields to just 3 or 4 would probably be better to prevent hording. At the minimum, I wish I could "favorite" things from the main menu to the quick menu, rather than having the quick menu just list everything. I really don't need food items in the quick menu.
I have only one complaint with your criticisms, and thats with flurry rush. I had no trouble flurry rushing as long as i learned the attack patterns of an enemy and saw them a few times. Unfortunately, this is bad, because when you can consistently flurry rush, the games combat splits wide open and shatters, as every illusion of difficulty melts away as you one combo an enemy. The abundance of flurry rush up royal weapons that deal double damage on flurry rush means that once you have a decent flurry rush up weapon, you can easily kill a lynel in about 6 flurry rushes. Lynels drop 2 horns on a kill, each adding anywhere from 20 to 70 damage to a weapon. If you combine this with literally any attack up buffs, you can easilly 2 combo any enemy with a flurry rush, and lynels are especially weak to this because they have VERY consistent flurry rush timings. By the end of the game, i had a full inventory of these weapons, and only the final boss was hard enough to get me bellow half health.
This confirms my suspicion that flurry rush breaks combat if it's performed consistently. As I mentioned in the video, it's not an interesting mechanic because when flurry rush activates there's only one possible response: hammering the attack button. Once you nail the timing and can trigger a flurry every time, there's nothing more to it. Thanks for this great comment and I hope you enjoyed the video.
You know, I think we all should realize that there is some positivity for a video game being linear or restrictive to the player. Actually when did the notion linear = bad for video game came from?
When Nintendo fanboys got to play their first open world game in 2017 it seems
You deserve more views and subscribers. But its sad how people who speak the truth on games like these dont get the recognition they should get.
There's 3 main reasons I didn't like this game. 1 bland combat. 2 the dungeons were not good. 3 The bosses were not that great either. If nintendo fixes all this I could see the 10/10s. But what I'm seeing now is people ignoring core flawed elements to this series that are arising and it's sad. The consumer shouldn't get a worse version of the product they used to. And in many ways this is. Your buildings can't change the flaws!
1. thecombat is good though. 2. They weren't that bad though. 3. Nahthe bosses were pretty great. They aren't ignoring core flawed elements. This isn't a worse version though. But it' not quite that flawed.
Off to a bad start with calling Twilight Princess and Wind Waker gimmicky and uninspired. Let's see if you can recover.
indeed , he does recover from those tangentially related blunders
My issue with the last two zeldas is how even though the size and scope of the games has increased massively, it feels like the enemy, location and dungeon variety inexplicably shrunk. Like walking into a cave and seeing the same hinox or lynel or shrine just got so old so fast and It never felt like I was actually rewarded for exploring. The only modern open world game I played that I feel worked was elden ring, because it solved that EXACT problem. Up until the last quarter of the game where the quality dropped noticeably, exploration was absolutely wild. Random lifts would yield entire cities, caves would lead to new enemies or interesting places, etc. I wanted to visit every cave and tomb becsuse sometimes, I would find something truly worth the effort. Botw and especially totk just felt dead. You could ahow me a screenshot of the depths and I literally couldn't place where tf it was on the map, because its all the fucking same. Stop making the maps massive if you aren't going to fill them with anything meaningful
I agree with your points about the game, but I think the title overlooks small open worlds, where points of new, interesting content and memorable experiences are bursting around every corner. A Short Hike is a prime example of this; there's absolutely no time wasted on repetition and in my opinion, it does ambient music leagues better than BotW or ToTk.
I'm slapping myself the hell you mean the lightroots are in the same place as the SURFACE SHRINES??? That makes things so much easier but also really...disappointing. Basically I'm just finding shrines, I don't care much for the Depths but it's hilarious how simple finding these lightroots are now.
BOTW's honeymoon period for criticism - 3 years. TOTK's honeymoon period for criticism - 3 months. This is telling, but ultimately VERY necessary, BOTW threw out far too much of what made Zelda special. There needs to be a synthesis between old and new... but getting TOTK after >6 Whole Years
BotW should have been its own ip. I will never change my mind on that.
This is a great point. I have a lot of issues with previous Zelda games. Something about the formats didn’t work for me. However, BOTW is my favorite game of all time. I would welcome the BOTW open world format blended with some of the linear elements and temples from other Zelda games at this point. 🤷🏻♂️ That could make for something really cool.
BOTW was a great introduction to a new formula, and with the lack of story and dungeons being such a huge criticism i thought that the devs would've focused on it in the sequel... Untill they don't With how most of the negative points from BOTW were barely fixed or they "fix it" in a very weird way, i feel like it's almost like the devs came and said "fuck you guys, we know what we are doing, can't you see how praised BOTW was? Didn't you saw our GOTY in 2017?" And did whatever they wanted It's really depressing how Zelda is descending in the same route as the Assassin's Creed series, and the fandom is accepting it so easily.
Best review on TOTK I have seen! I'm always relieved to see that rare handful of folks, not only sharing the immense disappointment I had with this game, but also explaining in great detail why. You sir, have nailed it! Just a shame it's gonna take the majority so long to come to the same conclusions I had with the game even before the damn thing came out!
"this review is the best because it agrees with my opinion" "it's gonna take the majority so long to come to the same conclusion as me" my god, dude. you're not the main character
"this review is the best because it agrees with my opinion" True "it's gonna take the majority so long to come to the same conclusion as me" Also true "my god, dude. you're not the main character" Correct, I'm just an NPC in your life
@@whit3shad3 i respect your opinion. but i disagree with it. the beauty of opinions is that they're not right or wrong. have a nice night
@@RedHatGuyYT you really showed your ass. He responded to you and made you look stupid. You are definitely some backwater side character lmfao
Finally someone feels the way I do. If I really had to pick between BOTW and TOTK I'd keep botw. I didn't know how to articulate it until now, but you've put all of my thoughts into words perfectly.
The thing about TOTK is that it feels like a DLC, and I know originally it was meant to be one, but when they saw all the content for it they decided it was necessary it needed to be a whole new game, it's not bad, like at all, it just feels like extra content for the sake of extra content, it's just BOTW from an alternate reality, it does the same as BOTW, but it changes the aesthetics, the depths literally add a whole new level, but there's not a lot to do, and the sky does add some things to do, but it's very limited because it's such a small space, it is just a larger BOTW, with the main difference that completing it 100% is just more of a drag than in BOTW. Again, I don't hate it, it is a great game, just before you realize you've reached the point of mindless repetition.
@@aimDiego I agree with you completely except I don't think it's a great game, at least for me after playing BoTW it certainly isn't (I am not gonna call a game great when 70-80% of my time playing feels like a chore or stuff I had done million times already in BoTW - which I loved btw!)
@@charliez077 yeah that's its main issue, I do think it's a great game, BUT, I've already played a smaller version of it, it's the same game, but big.
@@charliez077 I mean...I would say it's great since it really doesn't feel like a chore or stuff I had done in BOTW for the most part really.
If you think totk is a "simple dlc" to botw your braindead Do people have no clue what a sequel is anymore? By your idiot logic, super mario galaxy 2 is also "dlc" to galaxy 1 because you have the same basic moveset as the first game, your just in different levels, when both of those games offer up totally different gameplay ideas from eachother, besides the gravity mechanics. This comment section is full of braindead idiots
I guess that my hoarding tendencies have paid off in this game, because my experience seems to have been different! I rarely use zonai devices in my inventory to cheese the puzzles in game, bc my stingy brain would rather just find something nearby to solve problems so I can save my items. For the campfires, you can use the hot keys to throw down your wood and flint, so you don't have to go through your inventory. Or throw a fire fruit at the wood. Also, you don't have to keep opening your inventory in gerudo desert if you always wear both clothing that protects from the cold and the heat.
I know he already said this in the video but I couldn't agree more. I dont see how people gave this game 10's across the board. Ive played for more than 20hrs over the course of two whole days and I dropped out. Im done playing it because Tears doesnt feel like its offering me anything new enough for that price tag. Its basically just Breath of the wild but with expanded Fornite building mechanics... fucking BOO. Other than that, the story structure is the same, the world is filled with pretty much the SAME people you been interacting with since BOTW, the world is nearly identical and the Sky islands and Underground has a great intial awe factor and but a few minutes in and the air of uniqueness wears thin, leaving you to quickly realize... both new areas fucking suck. Tears doesn't take any risks or move the series along in any meaningful way... Its SO boring. If Tears is your first new Zelda game, then I could see how its an easy 10 but Ive played BOTW for over 2000hrs until I got sick of it and Tears will do pretty much NOTHING to relight the flame. Its pretty much the same shit you been playing imo.
This video deserves way more veiws
I think that fan opinions on this game have already soured. So many Zelda KZheadrs don't want to touch TOTK due to how lacking the story and lore of this game was, and it's purchases have grinded to a plateau far earlier than BOTW's. I myself loved the game and can't wait to reply with a 100%, however, I do see the point of many, and think that a DLC/expansion could fix some issues, but also hope that Nintendo would make a much more contained worlds in the next Zeldas.
After i finished this game i said to myself, if the next game is going to be like this i don't want to play another zelda game ever again, after that i started another playtrough, refused to eat or get hearts, i can only heal on beds i can only use horses that i encounter in the wild, i can only use tech that i encounter laying around, i don't use dispensers, no seeds, have plenty of crafted weapons only with the monsters i killed, i get rid of the weapons once a combat is finished. The amount of rules that i had to put to myself to "enjoy" the game was not worth it, the game was not fulfilling enough.
Please make more videos. This stuff is the peak of game analysis.
When you flurry Ganon, he'll counter your flurry with a dodge and flurry attack of his own, which you can dodge to get into a flurry rush again, so you have to do it multiple times in a row, which I think is neat, and flurry rushes are supposed to be triggered off of side dodges for vertical attacks or pokes/jabs, and back dodges for horizontal slashes and swipes. I agree it's certainly not consistent, but it does work like 80% of the time if you jump in the correct direction for most attacks, at least for basic enemies like Bocoblins, construct soldiers, Moblins, and Lynels, which are probably the most important ones. The captain level ones seem to be the most finicky to me, as well as things that fuse zonai devices or extend the length of them. Also, they can be triggered in the end animations after the attacks miss sometimes and that's ridiculous. This game is technically impressive, but not really for the time and budget behind, considering the physics engine was basically done when they started. Basically 11 years to make it, so it's cool, but not that mind blowing of an accomplishment for the given amount of time. This game honestly feels like a mobile game full of distractions that aren't necessarily fun, but they engage you and keep your attention enough until it really sinks in that there are no worthwhile rewards to get. You can't get pre-upgraded armor, you can't get a weapon that doesn't break or a way to repair weapons before they break (without the octorock thing, but that's kinda out of the way most of the time), you can't upgrade your abilities the way the runes could, and there really is nothing of offer that isn't just the next thing to do. It's "ooh, piece of candy" the game. You follow a trail of single pieces of candy and you may like the pieces of candy a little bit, there's never really a big chocolate bar or satisfying chunk of a thing at the end of any of the paths. After getting the auto build skill, I thought following Koga to all the mines would unlock more new abilities. But they didn't. That was probably the one "big" reward in the game, and it was a reward that breaks the game entirely
Ngl I actually had some troubles with this boss fight because there's not really another point in the game (or indeed in BOTW) where flurry rushes are ever required for anything, so I never really bothered to learn the flurry rush mechanics. I don't think it's good game design to do this, the final boss should really be a culmination of the skills you have learnt throughout the game; compare Skyward Sword, which constantly forces its swordplay mechanics on you, so by the time you get to Demise - yeah he's tough, but you know what you're doing.
@@alexpotts6520 Honestly, I think BotW does a better job of incentivizing use of flurry rush, but I'm still actually kinda impressed you just didn't really bother with it. You just use arrows for everything? That said, the flurry rush is kinda broken in TotK. It was a bit broken in BotW too, but I had more issues with it in Tears. Some enemy attacks you can properly dodge just before they hit you and it won't activate, other times they can completely whiff on their own, have their weapon planted in the ground or something, and you can jump sideways while next to it and activate a flurry rush at least a full second after the actual attack finished. vertical strikes and lunges need to be side dodged, and horizontal swipes need to be dodged with a backflip. The rest is timing for the mechanic, though that's something you need to learn through trial an error. Personally, I think this is Zelda's best final boss, at least in 3D. Most aren't actually that good, honestly. They may be able to better prompt players early on to utilize flurry rush more, maybe by decreasing weapon deterioration compared to normal attacks when using flurry rush, but idk if that'd help you without a tutorial specifically on that ability.
It feels like Nintendo doesn't play other games by other developers and therefore the problems within Nintendo games are recursive. Inventory issue would've been easily solved with a "Favorite" option, like Fallout or even Elden Ring. But Nintendo have this arrogance that they're above what others in the industry have been implementing for years. TotK might be the most recursive, regurgitated re-hash that Nintendo has put out to date
The problem of this game is that it happens in the same world of the anterior. The surprise is gone for those who played botw.
TOTK felt, to me, like BOTW with more annoying steps. I beat BOTW within a month of getting it. I got TOTK on launch day and haven't gotten past the second dungeon/temple in eight months. It's a chore.
The simple reality is that Nintendo has begun viewing the Zelda series in a very simple way that has become its decrement. They view it as a product of creativity. pure creativity is not fun. Not always at least. Its the reason I personally like chess as a game, and as a grandmaster once said, chess is the art of studying logical thinking.
It's also insane how this game goes from hardest at the beginning of game to getting easier as it goes. It's like the opposite of everything game design is about
Incredible video as always! I suppose you already have a list of games you have things to say about, but I am curious of what your opinion on Heaven's Vault is?
I very briefly mention Heaven's Vault in a couple of my videos, and I'm a big fan of it - it's one of those games that feels like it was made specifically for me. It would have been my favourite of that year if not for the fact that I played Outer Wilds a month later. I would like to talk about it on this channel some day, but it's quite far down the list to be honest. Thanks for the comment and glad to hear you're enjoying the channel!
I remembered that, after I beat the main story in BOTW, the rest of the game felt really hollow. This time I I did half of the temples and then focused on side quests, trying to soak the game up. My hope was that when I finally decided to check out the tantalizing things I’d seen in the world (the whirlpool in Lake Hylia for example) they’d be big rewards that capped off the game memorably. I think that diving through that whirlpool to find another cave and another shrine was when my opinion on the game shifted from positive to negative.
35:09 What's the background music that you used, there is one that you used frequently can you tell me it's name plz?
The track playing at 35:09 is called 'Construct Factory'.