@RogerRoger Despite the numerous similarities between the two games, I feel like BotW and TotK are fundamentally different to me as overall experiences. Even with how gigantic that iteration of Hyrule was, BotW was a fundamentally tight game where everything was subordinate and fed into the larger goal of gaining enough strength to defeat Calamity Ganon. As such, while I didn't rush to the end and experienced the majority of the game's meaningful content (i.e. not hunting down 900 Koroks), it also wasn't one I spent hundreds of hours playing like some people did. My playthrough was fundamentally geared around completing the main story content, but the game's sometimes brutal survivalist gameplay and slow creep of power accumulation as you complete shrines and find increasingly powerful weapons meant a lot of time 'inhabiting' the world as well. But the telos was always becoming powerful enough to defeat the final boss, so there was a remarkable harmony to the game's components. It's a game I admire immensely precisely for its purity of design.
That balance is lost in TotK for me. I'm not entirely sure what it is Link is even out to do, considering the first major story arc I completed didn't seem all that connected to the larger issue of Zelda's disappearance.
TotK has transitioned from an open world survival action-adventure to... well, a toybox, really. There's a main plot, and it may or may not become more interesting as it goes on (I'm currently totally unengaged with it; note how it took nearly a week of persistent play before I grudgingly decided to tackle some of the main story content), but there's so much stuff in this game, and very little of it subservient to a larger singular narrative goal. If anything, I'm strengthening Link and adventuring in order to increase my ability to explore more as the game goes on, largely for its own sake. I just spent about three hours today in the Depths mining Zoanite so that I can increase my energy wells and be able to play around more with the game's incredible Lego-like free crafting system.
I think I'll spend far more time with TotK, because, as I said, being uninvested in the larger narrative, I don't care about the pacing. I think it's also probably the funnest video game I've ever played. Insofar as Shigeru Miyamoto views video games as toys, I think TotK represents the pinnacle of their achievement as a company to date. But it won't be as memorable or admirably designed an experience. At least for me. I hope that makes sense.
It is funny @Ralizah as I think we have landed in mostly the same place, but for me it is almost a completely resounding positive, whereas to you it maybe has more caveats with it.
@Pizzamorg Direct sequels often go this route, where they lose the more cohesive design of the original game in pursuit of expanded gameplay opportunities, and I'm always iffy on them. Sometimes, like with Super Mario Galaxy 2, they go so far in this direction that they end up losing a lot of what I loved about the original. I think this will be more of a Rayman Legends situation, though, where what it gains over the original is significant enough to justify what it lost in the process.
I'll be curious where the Zelda team goes next, because it's hard to imagine expanding world design and gameplay possibilities beyond what they achieved in this game.
@Ralizah I did have to laugh when I saw an American streamer create essentially a predator drone to clear camps from a distance while Link chills. The comments were about what you’d expect from that scenario 😂
I think it is interesting too, because arguably (especially in the context of people giving this a 10), there is still plenty of work to be done in TOTK. Switch limitations aside, TOTK still isn't a perfect game as far as I am concerned. It has pretty weak combat, really unnecessarily frustrating difficulty tuning, at times genuinely terrible controls, an awful UI (and inventory management system) and some fairly dull encounter designs outside of open world emergent sequences.
However, would they really release a third BOTW style Zelda but just with all of the quality of life tweaks that are missing? Could they really get away with that? I'm starting to think based on the response to TOTK they maybe could.
And that isn't me trying to throw shade at TOTK, I genuinely like it more than I don't and have enjoyed it more than BOTW so far (even though I was more lukewarm on that than many) but I think anyone giving this a 10... that is just insanity. They may only be small transgressions TOTK commits in the scale of much grander magic, sure, but fewer small annoyances have sunk other ships when it comes to critical responses to things.
I think the next game is going to be more focused. Yes, it's going to improve some quality of life stuff. But it's also going to shake off some the bells and whistles of these games to make it more focused. And they have such an easy way to achieve it, The Legend of Zelda: Wake of the Wind.
It's going to be a sequel to The Wind Waker, pure and simple. Take the sea and put islands in there with stuff to do on them. You can start on Outset Islands, your powers are going to be a grappling hook, a wind waker, a hammer and a mirror ability. You'll leave the island, have a boat you can potentially customize, and sail where you want. During the game you're going to have to collect eight Triforce Shards.
It's going to feel brand new coming from TotK because of the sea and the wind waker itself. But it's also going to feel very focused, because they can drop the sky world, overworld, and everything that might have made this sequel feel so epic.
(Also, Aonuma announces it will be his last Zelda game, with it making this game complete the circle, seeing as he fully took over the Zelda reins solo directing Wind Waker.)
@Kidfried I genuinely wouldn't mind a Wind Waker remake that fleshed out the latter hours of that game. And righted the terrible way they treated Tetra in the closing hours, for that matter.
@Ralizah I have always loved the later hours. I never really understood how Breath of the Wild is lauded for its design, but the latter half of The Wind Waker was hated for doing something similar. It encourages exploration, and I have fond memories of it.
@Kidfried Breath of the Wild was designed around having a giant, fully interactive environment to explore. The Triforce shards hunt is only there because the development team didn't have time to finish all of the game's planned dungeons. TWW is otherwise still designed to be a sequence of dungeons and boss fights, like all post-OoT Zelda games up to BotW. It'd be the equivalent of OoT having you dig around in the dirt for hours before fighting Ganondorf.
The Wii U entry streamlined this process, but it really shouldn't have been there at all.
@nessisonett I'm pretty sure she's just tan from hanging out on the deck of a pirate ship all the time, although it still doesn't make sense she'd lose that when awakening to her true identity lol. But yeah, taking the formerly most badass character in that game and hiding her in a basement so she could get kidnapped was infuriating. Like... why? Zelda literally dresses up like a ninja and helps Link throughout OoT without memory issues! Even in the context of something like BotW, she's imprisoning Ganon, not visa versa. She's not a Princess Peach type of character that should be narratively tossed around like a football.
It's really too bad, because take away that part of her character arc, and she's one of the best iterations of the character in the series.
Recently I rarely played my Switch games as my PS4 games hype is still on.
I felt Switch in year 6 started to feel disappointing for some reason.
The machine is already outdated in my opinion and it made the bad treatment for physical release by certain developers.
I think I'll spend far more time with TotK, because, as I said, being uninvested in the larger narrative, I don't care about the pacing. I think it's also probably the funnest video game I've ever played. Insofar as Shigeru Miyamoto views video games as toys, I think TotK represents the pinnacle of their achievement as a company to date. But it won't be as memorable or admirably designed an experience. At least for me. I hope that makes sense.
Just quoting the end of your previous reply for context but yes, you're making perfect sense.
I often think about the relationship between storytelling and gameplay in games, especially when you get to see games with zero story go up against these complex narrative-driven experiences for the same GOTY award. I think Nintendo games are a good place to analyse the balance, because as charming and as beloved as their stories can be, they're often kept relatively simple whilst clever gameplay innovation takes centre stage. It's certainly what I've felt about previous Zelda games, as well as every Mario title I've ever played, and fits with that toy-centric design ethos you mention, too.
I'm somebody who places utmost importance on story and character when gaming, but there have been a few notable exceptions. Heck, just this year, I'm reminded of my reaction to Metal Gear Survive, when I concluded that its gameplay was a bigger draw than its story. Perhaps you'll be pleasantly surprised by Tears of the Kingdom by story's end, but I certainly feel that, the more I see and play, most of its effort is being spent on clever construction mechanics and puzzle solutions.
But hey, maybe it's not the destination that matters. Maybe it's the journey.
"We want different things, Crosshair. That doesn't mean that we have to be enemies."
Beat my third divine beast, which was the Gerudo one. That boss was one of the hardest I’ve fought in a Nintendo game to be honest. Probably because all of my gear was metal! At least that gave me the last heart I need for the Master Sword.
@RogerRoger To be clear, I don't think stories, in and of themselves, matter one whit in Zelda games. By and large, Zelda games don't have stories in any meaningful sense. They have long sequences of directed gameplay or setpieces (which culminated traditionally in the series' famous dungeons) and the narrative elements, as they are, exist to provide context and heighten the drama of what is happening on-screen. This is why most Zelda stories have been some variant of: go collect the seven thingies from these important people to unlock the power to defeat the bad guy!
That's obviously not to say there's not a layer of complex lore in the background, but it's not, and never, the focus of one of these games.
Which is why BotW's structure was so brilliant, IMO. It leaned even harder into this ethos, to the point where the traditional open world tension between gameplay and story disappear completely. Insofar as the story is about Link becoming strong enough to defeat the Calamity Ganon, the gameplay IS the story. You write the story with your actions, and the game molds itself around how you approach it.
This actually gave the designers some space to include real narrative elements that didn't somehow revolve around 'collect the thing to beat the guy' via the game's tragic backstory, which you can gradually unlock through the game via memories and hitting main story waypoints. Brilliantly, even this ties back into gameplay, but in a more organic way, as it's primarily a reward for exploration, and being immersed in your environment.
TotK tries something similar by making your goal to find Princess Zelda, but without an explicit, immediate goal that's connected to the flow of the gameplay, a lot of the game just ends up feeling sort of context-less. I'm sure they'll connect the dots between what I'm doing and what's happening in Bad Guy Land down the road, but it lacks the sort of unity of elements that BotW had.
So far, I'm playing just to play. Which isn't inherently a bad thing. That's how Mario games are, too, and those are some of the most beloved games to ever exist. But it does mean I am changing how I approach this title compared to its predecessor.
Interestingly, Monolith Soft was heavily involved with the development of these modern Zelda games, but they're seemingly the one internal Nintendo developer whose games actually prioritize narrative. Admittedly, the Xenoblade games lightened up on this a bit compared to their Playstation days, but a game like Xenoblade 3 still has practically a Metal Gear Solid-esque commitment to complex and emotional storytelling, with one set of connected cutscenes in the middle of the game actually practically being a movie in its own right, since it's roughly two hours long. Thankfully, there's, like, a three minute window of time in the middle to save/rest first lol.
55 hours of playtime over the last ten days lol. I've only done one of the four main story questlines so far and have only collected a third of the memories. I was wrapping up BotW after 75 hours.
This is gonna be a loooooooooong one.
@nessisonett I love that players were salty enough about her automated abuse that they very quickly found ways to destroy her flowerbed without even actually touching the ground and activating her animations.
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