VideoGame There's more to Quality than Quality of Life
I don't know if I'd call Tot K ambitious per se given how much of Bot W's ground it literally retreads, but it is the first time a mainline Zelda title has received a direct sequel since 1987 (not a gaiden game or handheld title). That has to count for something. It promises a bigger everything — two-and-a-half times the map size, thousands of possible weapons, a wholly superior powerset, and a grand, aeons-sweeping narrative — but it's as much (if not moreso) a step backwards as it is forwards.
The new runes are the single greatest departure from Bot W. With near-universal applicability compared to Bot W's runes, the Zonai powers allow for vastly more creativity and flexibility. Even so, Tot K's shrines, dungeons, and ambient puzzles never expect anything even approaching those powers' potential. A handful of dominant strategies (hoverbikes, rocket shields, ascension + recall cheese, and even just bomb arrows) can trivialize most puzzles. There's never a point where Tot K even comes close to demanding that the player fully utilize the breadth of their devices and abilities, much less the depth of those mechanics. The new Temples suffer especially, aesthetic overhaul be damned. Most of them end up feeling more like a set of easily-circumvented, loosely connected puzzles than genuine themed locations the way the Divine Beasts did. The gesture towards reintroducing key items in the form of Sage abilities is left largely underdeveloped, as the abilities themselves serve as little more than keys for barely disguised locks. Outside of the dungeon bosses and Lightning Temple, you never actually use their abilities to solve puzzles. The Water Temple in particular feels like four different open world shrines, not an actual dungeon, and you can complete the Fire Temple without so much as boarding a minecart. Whenever you're actually expected to use devices to proceed (e.g. to retrieve the sky island shrine crystals), the game almost always provides them for you. You're rarely if ever challenged to come up with your own solution. Even the Spirit Temple, the device-themed dungeon, gives you exactly what you need to progress through each depot. It feels like the designers are trying to have their cake and eat it, presenting you with "open-ended" puzzles that still include ready-made solutions, all so you don't actually have to solve them yourself.
As far as the story is concerned, Bot W's minimalistic, character-driven storytelling meshes perfectly with its open-ended, do-as-you-like progression mechanics.That same approach strains under the weight of Tot K's much heavier narrative. It's easy to spoil the plot of Tot K within the game itself, leaving you stuck conducting an investigation you've long since solved. Yet despite being a direct sequel, the game does little to explore the narrative continuity between Tot K and Bot W. The disappearance of the Sheikah Shrines (and most Sheikah tech), the connection between Calamity Ganon and Demon King Ganondorf, the fate of the Divine Beasts, etc. are all relegated to a single line of dialogue or an item description, if even that. Most characters have either forgotten who Link is or believe that he's simply a look-alike of the real hero.
For all the fun I had completing most of the game (all Shrines and Dungeons + fully upgraded sages), I don't think I'll be revisiting Tot K nearly as often as I revisit Bot W. It relies far too much on its prequel's structure without fully understanding why that structure worked so well in the first place. Limitations breed creativity, and Bot W makes breaking those limitations a much more engaging, rewarding process.
VideoGame How do you tighten something down by breaking it wide open?
There has never been something I've been more hyped for.
TOTK is the perfect refinement of the game design of its predecessor, and improves in so many ways as to almost make BOTW obsolete. The powers offered to the player often feel like cheat codes and completely supersede the previous set with their sheer breadth of applications—lifting and gluing any physics object and using mechanical devices, rising through any overhang or ceiling, reversing physics objects' motion? You will rarely miss the old powers—and only two of them. Weapons have been addressed with the Fuse power which lets you combine materials or weapons onto arrows, weapons, and shields. This means you can alter the function of your arsenal and up its durability by using Fuse, putting every utility/effect weapon at your discretion and reducing breakage frustration. Monster parts become much more worth fighting for as well, since they're the most powerful weapon enhancements now. Other aspects, like a new battery meter stat to upgrade and lots of new armor, make the gameplay loop more complex and yet more tidy and satisfying. The game feels less empty and more rewarding, and the ultimate prize is crafting and saving vehicles that can command the game world—including letting you free-fly from the surface to the highest island in the sky.
The world map is way busier now. The surface has a ton of caves and wells, the sky has many floating islands, and there's even more besides. The return to Hyrule is also narratively meaningful as we get the unique chance to check in on all of the characters and use prior map knowledge as a prompt for exploration. Playing this game a few years after BOTW is a great time. Each new environment type has one blanket aesthetic all around, and I wanted a bit more environmental variety than that, but it can slide since this game is a marvel. We do get some spooky vibes I felt were lacking before.
The story is pretty good. It doesn't strike much at the emotional power I favor, but the mythic arc is more compelling this time, with some good twists. Story is delivered in much the same way and answers questions perhaps too early if you front-load that quest before dungeons.
The dungeons are still short, but they're much more traditional and individual now. The dungeon powers are a clunky crutch that you can mostly grow beyond, which is disappointing.
The only other issue I have is that the sheer freedom over the map can lead to a disconnect from it. Late in the game, I lacked inventory because I had so many means to speed around that I was hardly slowing down and exploring the scenery for Koroks. Do yourself a favor and put down the flying machine once in a while.
This is a strong reiteration of game design that improves in almost every way. A potential third game will need to be quite a bit more divergent, but I was proven wrong about my doubts with the approach for this game.
VideoGame Easy GOTY 2023
First off, let me just say that the people who say this game is $70 DLC for Breath of the Wild are full of crap. This game is very similar to Breath of the Wild, but it's a vastly improved version of it, to the point where Breath of the Wild feels like a tech demo for this game. I skimped on the overwhelming majority of the side content, spending the overwhelming majority of my playthrough doing shrines, finding Lightroots in The Depths, and gathering materials to upgrade my armor/weapons/energy cell. I don't think it's an exaggeration to say I spent close to 100 hours on this game, if not more. Now onto the meat of the review.
The Good
- We have proper dungeons this time. Unlike the Divine Beasts, which could easily be completed in 15 minutes if you knew what you were doing, expect to spend at least hour on each of the temples. Even getting to the temples is often an ordeal, generally involving a lengthy trek through dangerous territory. They also have actual puzzles, as opposed to the Divine Beasts where half of the the puzzles were essentially "Press - then d-pad until you can safely stand in front of the terminal then press a".
- The new abilities of Link's arm are all worthy replacements from the Runes from BOTW. The most notable addition is definitely the Ultrahand ability, which lets you stick almost anything to anything else to create a variety of useful contraptions. While the controls for Ultrahand feel very awkward even in the end game, the auto-build ability you get early on greatly alleviates this. A close second is the Fuse ability, which while having limited applications in puzzle solving, allows you to fuse materials to your weapons, shields, and arrows for a variety of useful effects. This serves to fix a major flaw with BOTW, which is the complete lack of stuff to do with your materials.
The Bad
- Getting the Master Sword early or finding all of the Dragon's Tears too quickly completely breaks the narrative, as it spoils the big twist at the end of the second act, which Link chooses to keep quiet about for no particular reason even though that knowledge would make the protagonists' jobs in that portion of the game a million times easier.
- The whole end game sequence where you're sent on multiple lengthy excursions into The Depths that will ultimately lead you to where Ganondorf is hiding is a complete waste of time, as he's literally in the first place most players would think to look for him.
VideoGame Big shoes for tiny feet.
While I did overall enjoy the game, I think that my review will be brief, due to much of my impressions already being exposed in a better way in other reviews. But I feel that there was a lush, big world that was barely explored due to the limitations of its storytelling style.
One of the biggest impressions that I had when playing this Tot K was that little thought was given to how to balance each new element brought to the fray, to the point where it becomes weirdly frustrating. The Zonai devices were already mentioned in another review, but you also have new clothes! Either they are extremely situational (elemental attacks in weathers where monsters will be resistant to said element, without giving weather resistance), or downright useless, worse, requiring you to go through gauntlets to find pieces that end up redundant (going through three mazes just to look like Ganondorf, in a suit that I can't upgrade? No thanks). And thanks to the new progression system, where monsters 'upgrade' based on how many you killed instead of temples completed, upgrading your stuff became an unbearable chore. Didn't find the Hylian Armor in time? Good luck finding fifteen blue bokoblin bosses, better go to a reddit thread and sleep till the blood moon shows up. Fifteen? Yes, because requirements were cranked up, and now up to three different suits use the same resources. You'd need FORTY ONE hinox guts for four different sets. That's a lot of dead ogres. And asides from Lynels, not even the last boss offers a challenge worthy of grinding so much. Why not ease the burden? Give me a suit that enables me to get bugs without crouching!
You have two new whole maps to explore! Hurray! Except that the underground is nearly completely devoid of anything meaningful besides treasure chests, zonaite and two temples. We are speaking about a map the size of Hyrule. And the sky is nearly just as barren. You can't bind items from a menu, needing to repeatedly drop them on the floor and manually bind them to a weapon, and to toss an item, you need to try to toss your sword, even if you can bring said item up from a menu. Its the little things that start grinding the more you play.
But most of all, I think that the biggest waste was that it was a linear repeated story for a non-linear structure that invited something new. I can't fully blame myself for being disappointed because the game actually sets up as if something new and more interesting was going to happen: Oh hey, a new species! they are dead. New heroes from the past! they are dead and failed to stop a guy that falls like a chump if you so much upgrade half of your arsenal Ganondorf is shown scheming instead of just brute-forcing! What will he do? Oh he just stabs the queen instead of seducing her, or using Rauru's arrogance or anything else.
It nearly feels like a meme: "We've had one, yes. What about a second apocalyptic event where heroes of old were defeated and now Link has to clean up everyone's mess to save a Zelda that had to wait for untold aeons?" And since characterization and storytelling are minimal, everything feels wasted and repetition hurts more, the sages interact with you two or three times before learning their lessons and pledging their help and have a repeated cutscene that tells the same story instead of fleshing out the champions of the past. All because the writers didn't know how to deal with a linear narrative in an open game and shift the tone and pieces for a change. You can't have your cake and eat it.
And could have been controlled with just some tweaks, like only enabling Link to find the tears and learn Zelda's fate, after you killed Fake Zelda. In Breath of the Wild, each memory was self-contained in a way they were pieces of a larger puzzle, here, I accidentally found one of the last tears first and got spoiled to Rauru mourning his dead queen. What pisses me off most is that both photography, soundtrack and directing improved in LEAPS. The final fight is easy, but its downright gorgeous, with really good music and a touching directing. Why not shake things down a bit? Let there be more characterization and more moments in this enormous game. Let Rauru actually kill a more cunning Ganondorf who couldn't beat the king through assassination or brute force let Zelda remain a dragon to give a sense of gravitas and sacrifice and link either keep the zonai arm or lose his. Yeah, right, as if they'd do it. But at least let them kiss, dammit! Is nintendo such a prude that they couldn't show that Rauru and Sonia had a kid, nor let Link get the girl at the end!?
Again, while this review sounds like pure vitriol, I really enjoyed the game, I'm just pointing out that this is far from Game of the Year material, since its a huge, huge game, for a tiny twig of a story.