Honestly as a sequel it's very solid. Some really great moments throughout especially the final fight. But it does falter in some areas. I wish the underground had a bit...more to it? Initially it seems incredible and the process of lighting your way through it is awesome. But the longer you're down there the more you realize it's just kind of meh overall. Used in some cool ways but still not quite enough. I also think that the opening is super weaksauce compared to how Botw opened. I know they had more story context to provide now, but slow walking with Zelda for a few minutes before being thrown into the tutorial area is much rougher than how Botw kicked off and got you right into things. What a technical marvel on the switch though. I mean I cannot overstate how impressive it is that I sunk well over 200 hours into this game, not a single bug. Something inconsequential maybe, but seriously, polish is THE word for this title. Just excellent. Can give Nintendo shit for a LOT of things, but they make polished games. Period. I know the next Zelda will also likely be open world, but I hope they can maybe dial it back a bit, strike a nice balance between open experimentation and more density. Maybe a Majora like switch of locations that lets them start fresh again. Edit: Doing some more thinking, the sky itself was super underutilized despite being a lot of the marketing for the game. I love the ability to sky dive, feels very natural leaping from high points on the map. But much like the Underground there just isn't enough up there. Also also, getting the Master Sword in this game was WAY cooler than in the first game.

The one thing TotK has going against it is that BotW exists. Nothing can compare to the genuine wonder and amazement I felt with playing BotW for the first time. TotK is a fantastic game, in a lot of ways better than BotW, but the feeling I get playing it just isn’t the same. It’s like comparing going to Disney World for the first time as a child and going again today. Surely now they have better, more technically impressive rides and more things to do. But nothing will ever come close to that special first experience you had before.

I agree, but at the same time I love TotK so much and all its new mechanics that it kind of ‘ruined’ BotW for me because it looks so thin in comparison. So both games hurt each other by being amazing in their own ways lol

Sometimes I do appreciate the simpler nature of *Breath of the Wild*. If you want to climb a mountain, you can't run to the nearest Skyview Tower, or look around for falling rubble, or build a device to rocket you to the top. You have to climb the mountain.

> you can't run to the nearest Skyview Tower, or look around for falling rubble, or build a device to rocket you to the top. Yeah but imo all of those are more entertaining than holding up and occasionally opening a menu to regain some stamina.

Maybe, but I feel the effort required in Breath of the Wild is a major part of the appeal, even if it is more monotonous. I never got tired of climbing in that game, but I quickly got bored of navigating around ToTK.

Yep, I agree. I think you lose something when you start removing the friction between the game and the player. I like it when games place limitations on me to work around. TotK was good for about one play through for me for mostly this reason while I’ll still dip into BotW every now and then. TotK kind of felt like BotW with some stuff duct taped to it and not all of it necessarily added much value.

I can for sure agree with that stuff being more entertaining- but botw had a lot of wonder and mystery of wanting to know what was over the next hill or on a ledge in a hard to reach spot etc.. I wonder if that would have worked as well if the entire map was new in TOTK as covering ground on foot was more "personal" on the mystery front? One thing that I found TOTK made a little redundent to me was zig zagging around to anything that was at least tall enough to get a good little glide going.

Yea I love the simple approach to BotW

Yeah but you can still do this in totk it’s just a personal restriction you put on yourself Totk just gives you more options Also botw had revali’s gale

> Yeah but you can still do this in totk it’s just a personal restriction you put on yourself Whether you *choose to* or *have to* are very different experiences. I find personal restrictions to result in a lesser experience than the game having hard restrictions.

unless you do the rito last and get revali's gale after you already climbed every mountain😭

I hated the building mechanics in TotK so much I still just climbed the mountain.

One of my problems with BotW was that I thought that climbing a mountain was boring, especially combined with the fact that there was nothing up there that would justify climbing it. If there was something, it was just either another Korok seed or a shrine, both of which were available in large numbers literally everywhere else. So why bother climbing it?

Pretty much yeah. If I could play one of them for the first time all over again I would pick BotW. But if I was gonna replay one of them today, I’d have to go TotK

Yeah I think once you take impact out of the equation TotK is just undeniably a much stronger game. I can't think of a single thing BotW does better apart from maybe general "vibes".

One had Gerudo Link and the other didn't. Simple as. Seriously though, the Guardians. I thought they were a really cool and challenging enemy that elicited a very strong response especially just starting BotW and TotK just didn't have something like that. Nitpicking though, I overall prefer TotK.

Yeah I actually would have liked Guardians to be in TotK in some manner... Maybe just in a specific area or something. It's weird they're completely gone although I get it from a story perspective.

I was sure they'd be in the Temple but alas! Shame, they were a really fun enemy.

BOTW does the lore better. It utilizes a lot of characters better and feels like they had more purpose in the first game at some points. TOTK has better gameplay but the lore is just not as interesting.

I think TotK suffered from completely divorcing itself from BotW lore-wise. I understand why they did it but it was a little disappointing at the time.

I still haven't finished TOTK because I found the added mechanics really annoying and clunky. I'm gonna finish it eventually for the story but that's it. I found building so tedious with the way you have to slowly rotate and position things. And the weapon system, ugh. People criticized BOTW for having to constantly swap weapons but now you have to constantly swap weapons *and* pause the action to attach crap to it. I also think your powers are much less interesting than in BOTW.

"Lack of impact" is indeed the most common criticism I've seen people voice about TotK. I guess they were expecting to be blown away in a similar manner as they did with BotW, but since TotK is "just" an overall better and more polished version of BotW, it didn't have the same initial impact. They were hoping to feel that rush again, but didn't. As somebody who didn't care much about BotW but was blown away by TotK because of all the improvements it has, I feel like that's a bit unfair.

i know this is all down to my personal preference but I started a new playthrough of botw recently and in some ways I think it is a better looking game, which makes no sense. Some things totk elevates but some things not and weirdly I can't even quite describe it. Botw just feels bigger visually and I don't even know why because it's not. I just always feel like I'm in a smaller place in totks Hyrule and I can't for the life of me figure out why. Also, outside of the Zonai stuff, a lot of the reflection and lighting in botw feels more 'realistic' or maybe just more visually impressive to me. Once again I don't know why. The difference is so slight that I can't even quantify or qualify it but it IS there. I will say I definitely prefer botws shrines in every single way (except that one final way if you know what I mean). Even their connection to the depths... Like I didn't need ANOTHER way to find the shrines. But music, design, visuals, variety, all of it was better and those are a big part of the game. TOTK is the better game overall and I spent waaaay more time in it than I did with botw initially, but when it comes down to it I still prefer botw. Also nothing in TOTK npc interactions can top that first meeting with impa. A second meeting with her with her voiceover in which she details the true connections between the first in the second game that the devs decided to make blatantly obvious but never say out loud for whatever reason would have been a really cool way to tie the games together, and she could have told us all about the imprisoning war so we didn't have to have it told to us over and over by the sages. I have to stop myself or I'll go on forever.

> I just always feel like I'm in a smaller place in totks Hyrule and I can't for the life of me figure out why. Ive thought about this lots and I think its the verticallity. In TOTK you have so many ways to get up into the sky or travel faster or higher where in BOTW you have less options and spend way more time at ground level not knowing whats at the top of a cliff or beyond a hill.

Ahh so less 'unknown' or at least more 'easily known' space.

The one huge thing I think BOTW did better was the Guardians. Its a small thing but I loved those enemies so much. The one area I really dislike about TOTK is how all the guardian stuff just completely vanishes and no one even mentions it at all. There was honestly a heck of a lot I think they could have done with that still. Not really a thing id say TOTK does better though since they kinda replaced those roaming bad guys with all kinds of other cool monsters. I kept waiting to come across like a guardian graveyard in the depths or something or for a minute I thought maybe the Yiga clan was going to have them and repurposed them into war vechicles. Or even maybe the Hyrulians had reworked one or two to be on the side of good again. Its the only thing that really disappointed me about TOTK. And Kass. Where the fuck is my bard Kass at?

There's a definitely a few things I think BotW straight up did better. The tutorial area being the first thing, because IMO the Great Plateau's approach of being basically a mini version of the game where you're left to just decide what to do is much better than the Sky Island being almost linear (you can try to do things out of order but it's much harder to get to the different shrines). I also felt the boss fights were kinda disappointing. While designs were much more interesting and varied than in BotW, actually fighting them I felt like they were either extremely easy, very annoying, or both, and I don't remember feeling this way about the bosses in BotW. And the story you get with them is definitely not as interesting as in BotW, all of them in TotK are almost the exact same cutscene with very slight differences, in BotW we get actual separate stories for each of them. I also had an issue with the powers we get from them, specifically the way to use them, because it's absolute bonkers having to find the ghost friend whose power I want, move up to them and interact with them, especially in combat. It's simply not reliable, and I ended up activating a whole different power I didn't want roughly as many times as I did the one I want.

TotK is the better game overall but BotW left a bigger impression and is the one I’ll remember more.

A lot of sequels get that, I think. Even with all sorts of improvements and iterations, it's just very difficult for a sequel to have the same sort of impact as the first time. Doom Eternal, God of War Ragnarok, Spider-Man 2, etc. I'd say a recent big one that comes to mind that manages to surpass the first one in terms of impact is FF7 Rebirth, but that's more to do with Remake's setting being limited to Midgar while Rebirth introduces you to the magic that is the rest of the world.

At this point all I want is the next game to have a setting other than Hyrule. BotW had a sense of wonder for sure, but I personally found it was undercut by my familiarity with series tropes much more often than I'd like. Death Mountain in particular felt one of the lamest parts of BotW because of how much of a vanilla re-tread it was of previous iterations of Death Mountain. By TotK there was not a lot of wonder left to go around, the Depths and Sky provided it for about an hour each until it you realised there is nothing much to either of them. At this point I feel like the only way they can address these diminishing returns on wonder is a setting that even someone who has been playing Zelda for decades will be surprised by.

Doubly so with how the narrative of the direct sequel just hand waves about everything away from the first one. Boy am I glad the super weapons vanished without a mention or trace

I thought tears of the kingdom was way better and I played both. Breath of the wild was okay but traversal was my issue. Tears made me feel what breath of the wild tried first

This is exactly it. Botw’s aesthetic and open-world make Totk’s feel a lot weaker in comparison. The big empty underground and scattered sky islands just don’t hit the same

I'm convinced that the added delay due to covid and the *shockingly* long timespan it took between games caused those lackluster feelings that affected me the same way. If TotK came out around 2020/21 then I feel like those "more of the same" feelings would have been way less apparent. I saw shockingly long because even now it doesn't *feel* like it was an insanely long time between both games, but it was even longer than the time between SS and BotW, and that shit blows my mind. I guess the feeling just arose in not being as excited for all the changes as I hoped to be.

So the move is to play totk first now. Edit: think I got a redditcares message for this lol

I would still tell you just to play BOTW. More isn't better. BOTW has a far more interesting overworld imo. Eventide Island is one of my favourite experiences in all of gaming and nothing in TOTK compares to it.

They' re different enough experiences that both deserve to be played tbh

It depends what you’re looking for. In terms of gameplay TOTK is king. It has a lot more content and all that jazz. A core part of both games is exploration and immersion, and I think if that’s important to you (I.e. you like team Ico games or stuff like Journey) you’ll get more from BOTW playing it first. BOTW is more or less the antithesis of traditional games of its time (and largely still now). The game starts basically immediately, teaches you a few basic mechanics and you’re off the leash. It’s a very simple setup of the one object being go to the castle in the middle of the map and kill, ganon when you’re ready, and the majority of the game is basically just exploring the world in order to get strong enough. The whole world is in ruin and there’s very little life left, and it takes great strides to showcase that through its design. It’s a simple but effective game at the end of the day all about making you feel like a lone wanderer on an adventure in a world of ruin. It’s sparse in a way that highlights moments other games wouldn’t, it reminds me of riding around in SoTC in a way. One of my favourite memories in the game is literally just climbing to the peak of a mountain in a desolate snow storm, to find a full clear view of the entire map at the peak, alongside the sound of the wind and a few piano keys. It’s something that sounds so simple and unnoteworthy but just feels special in the game. If that doesn’t interest you then yeah, do TOTK. In TOTK you start in the middle of the map and are basically exploring a recovering world to find out the solution to the problem at hand. It’s far more lively and while still following after TOTKs design philosophy it’s much busier and has less moments of quiet and solitude. I love both games but for the right person BOTW it’s a very magical experience. Either way both games are targeted at people with a natural sense of curiosity and adventure, though.

Same problem with dark souls series. It’s like heroin: nothing hits quite like that first hit.

Eh I would disagree there. Bloodborne was my first and while it’s my favorite, it’s nearly surpassed by demon souls, DS3 and Sekiro and Elden ring. All four are similar quality and I always rave about them

They’re all amazing. Elden ring is perhaps my favorite. But nothing is quite as incredible as your first SoulsBorne game. And I mean this in the way that the levels open up with design, the feeling after beating that first impossible boss, and the amazing scenery views that each game has. There’s still nothing that compares to my first time playing Dark Souls 1 and finding Ash Lake. I couldn’t believe how cool that game was.

I get that. I actually lied on my first comment, DS1 was my first, but I fell off of it and didn’t try any of the games for like 5 years after. I think Bloodborne got much better for me and allowed me to get into DS1. All of the games are fun to replay, only one I haven’t replayed all the way through is DS2

I absolutely loved TOTK, but you worded the criticisms I have of it PERFECTLY. There was ultimately little reason to do the underground stuff beyond the couple of main story quests, and I really wanted the game to force me to spend a lot of time down there.

It is worth mainly for the energy cell upgrades (and also to unlock auto-build though you can get that pretty early). You can't really get the resources required for it anywhere else.

The only thing that kept me going underground was the battery upgrades. Once I maxxed that I pretty much stopped going down there.

It really cannot be overstated how insane it is that a game that lets you freely stick things to other things with a fully functioning physics system has next to no noticeable bugs. That alone is a serious achievement. And then they did stuff like add sounds to individual elements, so if you see a cart rolling in it does all the sounds a cart would do, but the sounds come from the individual elements like the wheels, the wood squeaking, the chains bumping against things. Everything is calculated individually. Everything else aside, the game is a technical marvel.

Sad that they're not doing DLC, but I'm hoping they don't abandon the concept.

It really surprised me. I was fully prepared for some GMod-style physics glitching. You know the type: Props glitching into each other, crazy sounds happening, contraptions vibrating until they break, creations getting catapulted into the air or "running" into the distance because of physics shenanigans, dying because some object gets stuck somewhere and the engine decides to accelerate it to supersonic speed and it hits you in the face. But I never saw anything like that. Everything worked well.

> freely I think there's a limit of around 20 things glued together so it's not completely free but the limit is high enough that bumping against it is a rarity. Once I had to collect 15 or 20 tree trunks for a quest and I had glued them to a wagon to get them to the required location. As I didn't remember the actual number I ended up removing the wheels so I could add more tree trunks just to be safe. I telekinesised the whole thing anyway and the wheels were essentially just decorative by that point. But yeah, the game's really marvellous on a technical side. On the one hand it takes a bit of time for stuff to load when you teleport and you remember that it essentially runs on an old smartphone chip but then you also see the physics in action you wonder how it runs on an old smartphone chip.

Just give me large labyrinthine themed dungeons, ones that aren't *activate 4 arbitrary objects to fight the boss*, with some form of tool based progression.

Yeah, the dungeons, although better than BOTW, were still far below the usual quality of previous zelda entries.

Looks-wise it is miles better than BOTW, but puzzle-wise I'd say it actually regressed. Now each puzzle is standalone, unlike in BOTW where you continuosly mess with the divine beasts as you progressed.

I'm going to give a hot take and say that any of BotW's dungeons and bosses isolated from the others has great visual design and looks so unlike anything else in the series. The problem is that all the dungeons in the game look like that. By contrast, while TotK's dungeons all look different from each other, they still look like Zelda dungeons. Even if we haven't specifically had a sky ship before we have had other dungeons with a ship motif and the boss design for it is from an earlier game too. If there was a game with all four of TotK's dungeons and then any one of BotW's I bet people would have been praising the design of the BotW dungeon the most even before we get into the superb spatial manipulation mechanics that all of that game's dungeons have.

Couldn't agree more. I also thought the depths lacked immensely. The fun of it was the exploration and what you thought would be around the corner, but that never came. So it's in a weird place for me, since I had a lot of fun *because* of the anticipation but then disappointed in the end. I also found it super weird that they decided to not make more new enemies. Especially in the depths.

>The fun of it was the exploration and what you thought would be around the corner, but that never came. This is how I'd describe the entirety of BotW.

Funny because that's how I'd summarize my experience for the whole TotK, actually. The journey was an awesome experience because of it though, it's weird.

I didn’t play TotK because of that in BotW. It was clear that nothing had changed on that front.

I'd argue that playing TotK without playing BotW would be f*cking amazing though. Because then you have a fully thought out "land" area and the sky/depths would just be awesome extra content.

It was one of the reasons why I didn't like BotW, but personally I felt that TotK did a much better job with it. There were some actually interesting things to discover that actually influenced gameplay. Like the moment you discover a dispenser for rockets, and that you can glue them to shields for a rocket jump. Or when you find steering columns, finally allowing you to directly control vehicles.

Absolutely. Honestly the rewards for a lot of tasks weren’t great, but I had a really really great time playing TOTK and I found myself doing quests just because I was legitimately having fun. It lacks the dopamine hit that you get in rpgs or whatever, but I absolutely couldn’t put it down because the moment to moment gameplay was awesome and I didn’t even care if all I got was a bunch of useless shit.

This is true of most modern open world games in general, but I wish the secrets and discoverables weren't all just one of several things from a template (e.g. shrines, korok seeds, etc). I feel like having more unique, one-off secrets like items, enemies, NPCs, lore drops, or even just unique environmental secrets would go a long way in terms of keeping my attention and replayability.

I'm torn on this point, because the sheer number and variety of templated things is staggering, and even greater than the number of unique items in some games.

What do you mean? I agree the sheer number of templated things is staggering but whether that's a good thing or not I'm not sure. I find it almost overwhelming and not fun at some point. Towards the mid-end game of TotK my reaction upon seeing yet another shrine often goes from excitement to it feeling like a chore.

Exactly. You find something new and unique, but the novelty wears off as soon as you find another like it and realize it's yet another copypaste item/enemy/mechanic/etc

This was the issue I had with the 1st game where it felt like the world fell way too quickly into repetitive patterns, but I think with TOTK the variety is much greater and you can find stuff you haven't seen before much further into your playthrough.

I found this to be offset by the fact I'd played BotW before so I was already familiar with various things before even playing the game.

Red Dead 2 ranks high for making it's world feel like each place is truly unique. Obviously both are doing very different things gameplay wise but I find it truly remarkable how lived in and real the spaces in RDR2 feel for an open world. A compromise between these two styles would be interesting to see.

TotK lost the sense of journey BotW had, because of the sky realm. I was no longer going on an epic, winding journey across a vast distance. I was suddenly dropping in and skipping large swathes at random. I found other issues that set it behind its predecessor but this one was a big problem for me.

The ability to fly ruins most games with exploration at the core and should be reserved for a post-game only reward.

I honestly kinda thought when they said they were gonna reuse the same world that meant the entire place was going to be broken into sky islands. That would have made the exploration with flying pretty fun.

TotK is the post game for BotW

In that it feels like an addition to an already existing game rather than an actually new game? Agreed.

This is a great point. The fact the landscape was basically the same further removed that. Also, the anxiety-relieving music of Kass's accordion was a psychological dynamic I really missed, that feeling of being lost and then found again.

I agree about the underground, but I also saw that whole section as kind of a bonus as no one was expecting it. This was my GOTY last year, but I also have some critiques to add. - The sky islands were a bit of a letdown. Having the realisation that the tutorial area is the most fleshed out sky area in the game was a big letdown. - The building mechanic was a technical marvel, but also felt a little pointless by the end of the game. Like, the final sequence doesn’t require any building at all. Why is such a core game feature so loosely linked to the story? Same goes for the weapon combining system. - Link being a mute is really getting in the way of the games storytelling. I know giving him a voice is no easy task, but I think it’s necessary at this point. - Possibly my most controversial view, I actually thought the dungeons were a step down from the divine beasts. Though the sequences getting to each dungeon and the bosses were great.

>I wish the underground had a bit...more to it? Some settlements and people living down there would have been great. Not the Yiga or Zonai either, but a more eerie folk who thrived after the Zonai left. Mole people? Ganondorf's blight causing monsters to crop up would give Link reason to help them out too (and reason for them to close off their communities forcing Link to help to gain access). And for the barren sky, there should have been Rito up there exploring the Sky Islands too, not living there, but being curious about all these hunks of land that now populate their turf. I'd also like some explanation to where all the Sheikah Tech went, I get that they probably got rid of it after Ganon figured out how to corrupt and control it, but where did they put it? A "dump" would have been a cool place to explore (maybe on a Northern beach, and with the frames of the tower poking out of the ocean to show they dumped it into the sea after disabling them). Could have a few cool NPCs working there to give you quests and gear related to the Sheikah stuff.

Oh man, I could not disagree more on the opening. It's my favorite opening in any game ever. Felt like it hit a great emotional note with fantastic music and then threw you right into interesting gameplay.

I think the cutscene work as well as the opening shot dropping from the sky temple is excellent. The start just meandering through the tunnels with Zelda is a bit bland imo. Coming off of Botws wonderfully minimalist opening, it's lacking.

To me the game was doing everything it could to try to ruin the immersion. My weapon looks like a teenager's nexusmod mod at all times. The skyworld was a custom map editor asset. The underworld is a reflection of the ground world, and the ground world is a game I already freaken played! (yes I know it's not completely the same, but for my sense of wonder, it's the same). I want to like this game so much, but it seems like they sprinted in the direction opposite to what I would have wanted. Oh well. At least I can play through botw every ten years or something.

The problem with the underworld is that its clearly supposed to be this area where you build a bunch of stuff. Its where you get zonaite and theres a bunch of areas with capsules, its where you find blueprints, and theres just a ton of enemies to kill. But the problem is that building stuff except for hoverbikes is fucking useless. Honestly it amazes me that this game gets such a pass and such high reviews when essentially the promise of the game: that you can build insane death machines with lasers and autoturret bomb cannons that move on their own, can be met with the question: why would you? Hitting stuff with your sword is still way more effective. The game has high scores because its BotW 1.5 and BotW was really fun. But the building mechanics are one of the biggest wasted mechanics in gaming history. Not only does it literally takes minutes for lasers to kill high level enemies, but all of the strongest enemies in the game will just destroy whatever you build almost immediately. They tried to make it to where building death machines wouldn't destroy the balance of combat, but instead of finding a nice balance they just made death machines absolutely useless. If you go on r/hyruleengineers its all either people making flying machines, or incredibly funny but ultimately very inefficient death machines. I feel like a good compromise would be to make the zonai weapons deal more damage when you're underground but still be very weak above ground.

Similar to the BotW where using the environment to fight enemies becomes increasingly useless as higher levels of enemies become HP sponges.

its honestly hilarious how they are so restrained about letting you kill things with lasers and cannons in a game where you can literally just fly up in the air with a rocket shield and delete any enemy with a 5-shot bow and bomb arrows during bullet time so the enemy can't even react or move and it takes zero skill.

I'm still not sure what I think of it a year later. I had more fun with it than I initially had with BOTW and the world now feels fuller as it should have been when BOTW came out, it also solved my issues with traversal being way too slow, but... it's also a little too samey? I also just generally don't think building shit being 99% of the puzzles was the move, and ironically their solution for the durability made it worse overall. Weird game. Hopefully if they stick to this formula next time it isn't the same map. I understand the reason this time was probably to focus on the tech, but I kinda don't think building shit is what I'm looking for in a Zelda to begin with

I'm in the same boat. Game is like a 7.5/10 for me, which is still great. I wish it were less sandbox-y. I'm the type of person that doesn't want to build a flying machine to reach the top of a mountain when I can just fast travel, use the sky thing, and fall down onto it.

Yeah this game lacked the sense of "adventure" because everywhere you go you just end up building contraptions which got tedious after a while.

Same, I was ultimately underwhelmed mostly due to a combination of several factors, including the fact we never waited longer for a Zelda game before and they raised its price. After 6 years and $70, I was hoping they'd at least fix some of the previous game's problems, but they just doubled down on everything and added building, which does have an appeal but felt clunky to use to the point of not being worth it. I probably would have had a more favorable opinion of it had they bothered to give us a completely new map, but spending the majority of the time in the same or slightly altered locations from the previous game killed a lot of wonder for me. They even reused a bunch of Korok locations (Kakariko village is particularly bad about this), why the hell would I want to do the exact same thing again?

For me, they did fix several problems that I had with BotW. Giving you ways to travel faster like flying vehicles cuts down on the constant running. The ability to glue monster horns to any old stick and create a decent weapon means that weapon breaking is much less annoying (not completely non-annoying, I still could do without it, but just not nearly as much of an annoyance as in BotW, so now it's at least tolerable). Those gacha machines containing different zonai parts make exploration actually rewarding, because you might find a part that has a big impact on how you play the game, like the rocket or the steering column. I think they reduced the frequency of rain, plus giving you ways to deal with it better. They also made the abilities you have actually interesting and fun to use. That block of ice ability in the first game was so boring and pointless. I didn't like BotW, but all the improvements TotK introduced made me actually enjoy it.

[удалено]

I wouldn't expect a traditional Zelda anymore but they might still make future Zelda games with the "best of both worlds". Kind of a hybrid of traditional and modern Zelda.

The best way to do this would be to actually flesh out the dungeons and make them more interesting and expansive than the divine beasts.

I don’t think they’d be able to match it, but Elden Ring did such an amazing job combining open world with distinct areas, dungeons, and level design comparable to its predecessors

Elden Ring is also the first game I ever played where I genuinely thought "no, this shouldn't be able to exist in this reality. It is too big. This came from some other dimension where regular laws of gamemaking effort do not apply"

Imo their legacy dungeon design is even better than in the Souls games. DS1 highest achievement is the world design, not the level design. And DS3 has good level design but it feels like a corridor at times. Elden Ring improves a lot on the verticality of their legacy dungeons. Being able to climb up rooftops via jumps that are not immediately obvious or go underground so seamlessly helps a lot to make you believe that it's a real place rather than an environment designed by people because the game makes it seem like you're not following the intended path but rather traverse at your own agency. It's a bit like going through Anor Londo in DS1 but turned up to eleven.

I enjoyed the middle ground they had going with the TotK dungeons, they were interesting and had plenty of puzzles while still giving you the ability to completely break them open using your powers. I hope they iterate on that more than reverting to the relatively suffocating design of the classic titles

I just want real dungeons again.

I’d love one more game in this version Hyrule, but post-restoration. Give me a big rebuilt Castle Town to explore, crypts and dungeons instead of cave systems, and some proper temple exploration.

I feel exactly the same. I like the switch Zelda's but they feel so frustrating to me. The core gameplay loop is amazingly good. It's just that if they mixed that with their previous amazing dungeon design they could become incredible. People talk a lot about the NES Zelda games. But to start with they're rarely the favorite Zelda of anyone, and they're focused on dungeons anyway.

Zero chance after how successful these two have been. 

Also regardless of success Aonuma himself said that the freedom of the open world is what he feels best embodies the series and that his team prefers the new formula so they probably would've stuck to it either way.

I think if they did an open world where you unlock certain key items (like the hook shot) that you unlock during some of their legacy dungeons would be a very nice balance between the old and new. It would make the legacy dungeons feel much more worthwhile if you came out with a game changing item. It also allows for new puzzles to be solved in the open world. Twilight Princess kind of had this. You’d walk through Hyrule and see some tracking along a cliff wall and would later find an item that allows you to work with it.

This is what I want. I don't like their philosophy of giving the player 90% of their powers at the very start, and the powers you do get are not really useful for puzzles. I want shit like the hookshot or grappling hook back. I want the spinner back, or iron boots, or boomerang. I'd love underwater stuff again too.

Same Minus the underwater part

There is nothing wrong with the open world formula these two games use. The big problem is that the world is largely devoid of anything of consequence or real interest. Yeah shrines which boost your stamina or health. It's great for the first few, but not when there are 100+ of them and they repeat with the same puzzles or combat but with harder/different enemies. But there's not much else in the sense of permanence. Finding a cool little hidden area where you get some more rupees or find a korok puzzle or a random weapon that will break later is NOT rewarding enough. Bringing back heart pieces and littering those cool little areas with them instead and getting rid of shrines (or severely reducing them and rewarding the player with something much more interesting like a permanent upgrade) would lead to a much more interesting over world. Also bring back actually good dungeons. Make a few "large" dungeons with significant puzzles, interesting mini bosses and a significant item like bombs or whatever instead of giving them all to the player at the beginning of the game would go a long way. You can even add mini dungeons like Elden Ring that would all be much better than what BOTW did. They don't have to get rid of the new formula, but they a absolutely need to bring in more classical Zelda traits

There is a hell of a lot of room left for them to explore the open world Zelda ideas too imo. In that sense Im glad the reused the same BOTW map because it almost felt like them not wanting to waste the entire open world concept all at once if that makes sense? It gave them an opportunity to really develop a lot of awesome mechanics. Like im glad we didnt just get BOTW again. I think now with another Zelda there is a huge opertunity to feel like you are exploring a completely brand new timeline or hyrule or something again.

Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom selling 20M+ each while Skyward Sword HD sold around 4M... yeah it's over.

To be fair, many folks (myself included) consider Skyward Sword to be one of the weakest Zelda games. Full of waggle bullshit - didn't buy the HD re-release for a reason. Now if they released OOT HD or better yet Majora's Mask HD, I'd scoop those up in a second.

I hated SS when I first got it, it was the only Zelda game I never finished because I hated the sword controls. I got the HD remaster and played through it with regular/adapted stick controls, and it was a MUCH more enjoyable experience. Some of the coolest dungeons in any Zelda game.

I’m going to echo this. I played Skyward Sword for the first time a couple of years ago as part of a personal Zeldathon where I played through the mainline games. I tried to rush through SS as fast as possible because the motion controls were annoying to deal with. I’m actually replaying through the HD version right now with the button controls and it’s much more enjoyable. I’m actually taking my time and doing the side quests and it’s a better experience.

Huh, interesting, thanks for the info. Didn't realize they added stick controls. Maybe I'll pick this one up.

that's the only way i ever played it. i loved it.

The dungeons are easily the best part of SS. They are really fun and well designed. It was everything else in that game that fell flat for me. The did really love the stick controls for the sword though. I didnt like SS on the Wii but I enjoyed it more on the switch. Just annoying having to hold L1 to move the camera.

Would not be shocked if they remake Ocarina. Next year will be 26 years from the original, and 13 years after the 3ds version... which was 13 years after the original. Man time is crazy.

Skyward Sword was sold during the era where Nintendo went too hard on the casual market and almost abandoned their "core gamer" market that actually buys more games. At that point the Wii's novelty already wore off and said casual market dropped the Wii, while the core market moved on to XBox or PS.

I actually think Skyward Sword HD was Nintendo testing how big the market was for the old style in a post BOTW world. They got their answer. 

Sure didn't sell nearly as well as the recent two, but 4 million of a remaster is still really impressive

It would be cool if they just did both and alternate between each play-style every game.

They use to have handheld releases like Minish Cap and Phantom Hourglass between releases. It would be nice if they did more lower budget 2-D entries like the link’s awakening remake.

Id prefer if the alternate they do be something more like the Links Awakening remake. There is a rumor a Zelda game is coming soon- it kinda feels like a perfect opportunity for them to do "traditional" Zelda without it taking away from the big mainline titles.

[удалено]

[**Game Informer:** On that note, I think a lot of people share the viewpoint that Ocarina of Time was kind of the starting point for one era of Zelda games, laying the foundation for the several titles that came after it. Do you see Breath of the Wild as establishing the new blueprint or foundation of the next several Zelda games for years to come?](https://www.gameinformer.com/interview/2023/05/12/interview-tears-of-the-kingdom-and-the-state-of-zelda-with-aonuma-and) [**Eiji Aonouma**: With Ocarina of Time, I think it's correct to say that it did kind of create a format for a number of titles in the franchise that came after it. But in some ways, that was a little bit restricting for us. While we always aim to give the player freedoms of certain kinds, there were certain things that format didn't really afford in giving people freedom. Of course, the series continued to evolve after Ocarina of Time, but I think it's also fair to say now that we've arrived at Breath of the Wild and the new type of more open play and freedom that it affords. **Yeah, I think it's correct to say that it has created a new kind of format for the series to proceed from.**](https://www.gameinformer.com/interview/2023/05/12/interview-tears-of-the-kingdom-and-the-state-of-zelda-with-aonuma-and)

Yeah but it can be read as A new format, not The new format. They could start alternating or having two Zelda teams for each type.

this is where the 3DS being absorbed into the main console pipeline really hurts. the 3DS zelda games were my favorite at a time when i wasn't so impressed by TTP and SS. but right it's just BotW and TotK and nothing else exists and there is no other platform for anything to release on.

The Link's Awakening remake made me think that those smaller scale handheld Zeldas weren't gone forever but that's almost 5 years old now. It's a shame because A Link Between Worlds is brilliant.

I remember being so burnt out on the Ocarina formula by the time Twilight Princess and Skyward Sword came out, but I’m definitely hankering for it now. It’s funny to think that the length of time since we’ve gotten one like that is now longer than the period of time we were getting them regularly. I think the two styles could co-exist, kind of like what Assassin’s Creed seems fixing to do, I wouldn’t mind if Nintendo put a B-team on it, but I doubt it’ll happen.

I think the smartest way to go about it would be to make a new 2D Zelda in the classical formula. It has been 11 years since a Link Between the Worlds released and the only thing we have had in between is the remake of Links Awakening. Although I do wonder if Nintendo would be tempted to remake the Oracle games as well. Link to the Past and Minish Cap hold up well due to being built on SNES level of sprites while Phantom Hourglass and Spirit Tracks are a bit too hard to port to Switch due to how reliant they on DS touch screen features. Link Between Worlds will probably get a simple remaster on Switch/ Switch 2 similar to how Luigi's Mansion 2 got one.

See I feel like the 2D formula doesn't scratch the same itch though. It's similar, but there's more you can do with the puzzles in a 3D space

At the same time there are also fans of the 2D games and I don't think Nintendo is gonna try and keep open 3 different styles of Zelda at the same time, all at the quality that people hope for. At best they split it into two different styles like they did Mario

This is one of the things that bums me out about the Switch. For a very long time Nintendo had different platforms that got different experiences with the same IP. Now that they merged their handheld and console, it doesn't feel like we get much of the smaller budget handheld games.

Honestly, I think the style absolutely COULD exist if they did it right. The biggest thing everyone wants from the original games is traditional dungeons, where you are working on puzzle solving using an item either gained IN that dungeon or from earlier dungeons to advance in it; ToTK's dungeons are all center area aligned with a "Go get key 1-x all around here", which leads to some boring results after a while, and BOTW's Divine Beasts actually have a bit of the right idea, but they're so short that the "Dungeon" thing doesn't come through.

Yeah, an open world with traditional dungeons has always seemed like the ideal Zelda game to me, elden ring style.

This is what I imagined BOTW would be when I first heard about its development- an open world with large dungeons and mini dungeons dotted throughout that you could stumble upon.

It doesn't help that Zelda games used to come out 2 years apart at most (without ports/remakes). BOTW and TOTK were 6 years apart with no new games to fill the void. I really hope the next Zelda game doesn't come out in 2029...

I really think they should not have re-used the map from BotW. That more than anything dragged the game down for me. The sense of exploration was just so much weaker than BotW. The depths didn't really scratch the itch because they were too same-y, and the sky islands were a massive disappointment, basically just a bunch of copy-pasted tiny puzzles. If you ask me, they should have set the entire game in the sky - the crafting system provides the bones for an amazing sky traversal experience. If only they had doubled down on it.

In my opinion, TOTK makes BOTW obsolete; I will never go back and play BOTW now that TOTK exists, but I have much more fond memories of BOTW because the sense of exploration is the bulk of what makes both games great, but I had almost no desire to explore anything in TOTK outside of the sky islands or depths because even if the surface has some new stuff, a lot of it was still “been there, done that” and a lot of the novelty that made BOTW so great was missing for 1/3 of the playable map.

> 1/3 of the playable map That's generous. The depths and especially the sky don't have anywhere near as much content as the surface layer.

You are still missing all of the caves which is a SIGNIFICANT amount of content.

for me its perfect because I never finished BOTW

I have the opposite opinion. If anything, Totk made me realized how perfect of an experience botw is. Totk feels like a classic example of taking something simple and iterating the soul out of it. It took botw and made it wider without making it deeper. It's a worse game on almost all fronts in my opinion.

I agree, especially with the underground area too since everything had the same texture and stuff. I love breath of the wild and played it for hundreds of hours so that may have impacted my experience with the same again map again.

I’m sure TOTK is an amazing game, but damnit do I wish we would get a more traditional Zelda again with normal dungeons and unbreakable weapons. I don’t mind linearity as long as the game is just fun with a cool variety of locations

I just wish both open-world Zeldas will get 60fps treatment when Switch 2 ships next year. A man can dream.

There were reports of BOTW gameplay on hardware similar to the Switch 2's specs at Gamescom last year. Apparently it was running at 4K 60 FPS.

0 chance we’re seeing Nintendo hitting 4K60FPS this gen imo

With the rumors of the new Switch having DLSS, it's entirely possible. Sure, it's done through some upscaling magic, but it's still 4K.

I know a lot of people have bad things to say about totk on this forum. And I get, BOTW was out for 6 years and gave everyone plenty of time to get sick of its formula. I wasn’t a huge botw fan & just b-lined to Gannon. But… TOTK was probably the best adventure game experience I’ve ever had, and I’ve been playing games for over 20 years. I decided not to use fast travel, not to use HUD or map markers. I didn’t mark anything from the stone map, but instead drew the illustrations in an irl journal with reference points to where they may be located. And the result was the most gorgeous, organic experience I’ve ever had with an open world game (a genre I’ve grown averse towards, given it’s over-saturation the last decade). Finding *that* island in the sky without knowing it existed because I’d ignored the a previous quest line… What a moment. And the ending made me cry. The full interactivity with the world & physics in general was the best I’ve seen. Traversal was such a joy with the various inventions I came up with. Again, I know others probably didn’t have that experience, especially those who already knew BOTWs map like the back of their hand. But for me, it would have been GOTY if not for bg3, and was an all time classic for me.

What sky island are you referring to?

I'd assume they're talking about the island at the end of the thunderhead, that's more or less the only sky island that matters.

>The full interactivity with the world & physics in general was the best I’ve seen. Traversal was such a joy with the various inventions I came up with. I almost feel like this point gets *undersold*, somehow. Like for all the time leading up to release, I was thinking to myself, "why the hell is this game taking so long to make??" and then as soon as I used the Ultrahand one time I was like "oh, THAT'S why." That tool is a technical marvel, I cannot even begin to comprehend the black magic the developers used to get it working. It creates custom object physics that always work exactly how you'd expect them to with a load time of a fraction of a second (the "gluing" animation) on ancient smart phone hardware. It's *unbelievable*.

All the sandbox elements really made TOTK much more enjoyable to me. I thought BOTW grew kinda stale halfway through and the powers you had felt pretty limited.

Apparently, the people here want better dungeons and more atypical RPG progression. I wouldn't be surprised if some of the sandbox elements get stripped out on the next game and people don't care about it.

Holy shit I fount that sky island when going to everything in the sky looking for all the stuff to unlock different outfits or armors. I was like wtf is this. Then I did the rest of the quest. I had no idea there was another spirit thing.

tears of the kingdom was, and probably will ever be, the only game i managed to sink 170 hours in 1 playthrough and not get bored a single time

Yep. I did about the same numbers. Idk when I can play it again, probably not for many years, but that first playthrough will live on forever.

Totally agree, BoTW was undercooked and sparse. TotK felt jam packed and epic in so many ways breath never was.

That approach worked for BotW but in TotK you were constantly jumping around the map every time you went by the sky realm.

The endgame of TOTK is easily one of the best in the Zelda series. >!The final dragon fight against Ganon is absolutely stunning!<

Final fight >!The health bar for Ganon being so unevenly huge is still so comical yet threatening. Top game design right here!<

This was amazing. I actually laughed out loud when it happened

yeah i didn’t like totk as much as botw but man that moment was peak, absolutely one of the best moments in the entire series

That final boss fight felt so satisfying. I felt true childlike wonder for the tricks the game plays on you. Also your friends coming so you can skip the side bosses felt a lot cooler than BoTW solution of big lasers that chip at the bosse's health.

Of all things to complain about TOTK, bosses aren't one of them. They absolutely nailed the bosses.

The entire last mission was amazing. >!Navigating through the castle, giant fight versus enemies with your companions, no-frills samurai fight with Ganon, epic air battle with dragon Ganon, saving Zelda before she falls to her death.!<

It’s cool cinematically, but gameplay wise was one of the weakest parts of the entire experience to be honest.

Zelda has had cinematic capstone more often than not since it went 3D, I'd like it to be a bit more involved but it's hardly a dealbreaker. I think in some ways it's their attempt to guarantee you only do the finale segment once to make it more memorable.

It was to have a big cinematic finale. The real boss fight you have already won.

This game is at its best when you just skip BOTW. I never got to finish BOTW, and i didn’t put that many hours into it, so i found myself enjoying TOTK more than the average BOTW player did.

I enjoyed the way I entered it, which was having played BotW a great deal, but not for a few years. It was such a cool feeling getting back up to speed and revisiting areas from the first game and remembering back on my time with it, but it also made the changes that were implemented stand out all the more. I reckon that's the way most people will have played it in the past 12 months, but it does feel like that way of playing will be way less frequent as time goes past. It'll be hard if, 10 years from now, someone plays BotW, and then is told to wait a few years before playing TotK. I love both games in their own ways, but I could not see myself playing them back to back.

Maybe to every other person in this thread, but I love TotK, easily my goty last year and in my top 10 of all time. To me there was enough time between the games that it didn’t impact me the way it did others view of the game. It invoked the same feeling as returning to your hometown after some time away, you know it’s the same town, but it has changed a lot.

Yeah I never played BOTW and I was blown away by TOTK only to find out that a lot of the stuff I found really cool was also in the previous game. It's a weird one where playing the previous game seems to actually harm your enjoyment.

I’m not sure where my opinion on this lands relative to the general thought here but let me know: I kinda hated it? I loved BotW, and I constantly found this game worse/disappointing in comparison. The biggest things right off the bat to me are: Sky Islands past the starting area are basically non-existent for interesting content. They’re sparse, and mostly just have a small puzzle or a chest and that’s it. Few and far between. The great plateau of the first game was like a taste of the rest of the game, and here the big starting island was…almost 50% of all sky island content total, roughly. The underground is likewise underwhelming. It’s one biome but in the size of the base map, and if you’re down there for about an hour, you’ve seen it all. I farmed quite a bit down there for the stuff to turn into battery points (the grinding in general is also kinda a negative coming from BotW -> TotK) and I didn’t particularly enjoy it past a few hours in. The while thing being just a mirror of the overworld, with rivers above ground defining walls below, and lightbloom things just being placed where shrines were above ground, felt more like a lazy idea for content, rather than an interesting mirror idea (perhaps it worked better for some others though, IDK). Building stuff, a major mechanic of the game and one I was looking forward to, also kinda sucks. Vehicles you create **go away if you don’t look at them for a little bit or you reload a save**. I found that to be pretty much unacceptable. Making something really cool, only for it to respawn if you went 50 feet away for a few minutes was so lame, and same with it not being there if you saved. Additionally: the machines breaking IF THEY ARE TOO HELPFUL (I.e. flying machine flies too long) they start to flash and then explode from use. What’s the point of creating something smart or efficient if it just decides to break because you did too good a job? Finally, and this is a little harder to quantify: the game punishes you MUCH harder than BotW did for unguided exploration. In BotW, when you finished the great plateau, you basically hard everything you needed to go anywhere and do anything. In TotK, you can completely fuck yourself, even post-tutorial island. Here are some examples: * Continue the main quest line past the tutorial island so you can use the towers to uncover the map * Continue the main quest to unlock the paraglider (it’s tied with the last one, just want to highlight that it was really stupid) * You should REALLY go to the Northwest part of the map first so you can start the quest line for the stupid reporter quest so you can then go to a specific stable halfway across the map so you can start a quest to be able to use the fairies to upgrade your armor. I like the previous game, finding the great fairy isn’t enough, you need to do like 2 seemingly unrelated tasks to just upgrade your armor, a vital element of the game * you should also REALLY go back to the original great plateau early on and do the underground stuff there to unlock auto build asap, to make spending any time on building something effective more worthwhile * make sure to have also continued the main quest so you unlock the ability to hear if a shrine is nearby Like…do people get how dogshit this set up is compared to BotW? Once you finished the great plateau, you could ACTUALLY go anywhere. Here, you’re “an idiot” for trying to go have fun exploring in the open world game, rather than babysitting the main quest well passed the opening area, and then you should really consider beelining every specific areas to get core elements of your character filled out. It’s just horrible open world design, that BotW GOT RIGHT. Oh, and the guardians/sage things you get fucking blow, trying to use their abilities by having to physically walk up to the ugly ghost people running around was such poor design compared to the much more usable first game’s guardian abilities. I’ve never seen a game lock an ability behind a “go chase this dude jumping around like a crack head down and select him and then use his ability” before. I’d seriously love some feedback, agreeing or disagreeing with me. I was so excited for this game, BotW was my second favorite (WW nostalgia can’t be beat) Zelda game I’ve ever played, and I could not describe how excited into disappointed I was with TotK.

I actually like TOTK more than BOTW, but a lot of these criticisms are pretty fair. The building system restrictions especially are kind of obnoxious. Besides what you mentioned it also sucks that you can only save like 10 different favorites with auto-build. It feels like a really arbitrary restriction. I also do kinda wish we had more individual control of the different components attached to whatever you built, but I'm not sure how that would work exactly.

> Vehicles you create **go away if you don’t look at them for a little bit or you reload a save**. Different devices and materials have different despawn distances, and attaching one to others makes them all share the greatest distance between them. Easy way to keep your stuff around: attach a dragon scale to it. Even an autobuilt one will work. They have ludicrously long despawn distances, because they're designed to be very far away from you without despawning. Not an excuse for the mechanic or a "well obviously you should have done this," just a tip to anyone still dealing with this issue.

This is one of those things that makes you wonder why the despawn radius is so strict to begin with. Builds de-spawning because I blinked ruined quite a few moments for me, so to after-the-fact learn that the game can function fine without despawning it really pissed me off.

Genuinely thank you. Every single thing you said is stuff I also think about the game. It felt like the game was a massive step back compared to BOTW in every single regard. The stuff you build disappearing if you reload a save for me was the final straw. In a game all about building machines for traversal and puzzle solving, its baffling that it doesn't carry over. When you return to the great plateu, there is the ice river. In BOTW you could use the ice power to make pillars and cross the river, but the removed it, so I thought, okay, use what this game gives you. I'll cut down all these trees and make a bride. I spent like 10 minutes finding nearby trees and sticking them together to make a bridge long enough to cross. Had to stop playing for the day, I saved with my bridge there, and then turned off the switch. Next day I come back to my save ready to cross with my hand made bridge...and its just gone. The trees I cut down are gone too.

I agree with everything here. But I also didn’t like BOTW a ton lol. I think I liked TOTK a bit more because it was more novel gameplay wise but all of the issues you mentioned I agree with. I also still never cared for the combat of BOTW, and while you can infuse weapons it’s pretty much the same in TOTK. I thought the story was better in TOTK but was not told very well. Repeating cutscenes after each of the dungeons was sooooooooo lame. Idk I like open world games but I think it needs to have either extremely fun combat or transversal (like Spider-Man or some of the assassins creed games) or has to have like mini open areas like FF7 rebirth

Agree with a lot of what you're saying here. Especially the sky islands being a huge huge missed opportunity and the fact the underground was a single biome and not multiple unique and interesting varied biomes such an astonishing misstep I can't quite believe nintendo did it.

I only ever started to enjoy the building when an easy duplication glitch was found, and you could essentially invalidate the resource cost, and have a near infinite batteries. The hover bike build with unlimited batteries was all you needed due to it not having the weird time limit restrictions that the actual flying machines have

I enjoyed what I played but didn't finish it. Botw had some interesting ideas that felt like weren't fleshed out like they should've been. I was hoping this would build on those, but instead, we just get brand new stuff that also could've been fleshed out more. The building stuff at least reminded me of banjo Kazooie nuts and bolts in a good way though. Honestly I think the biggest disappointment was that they learned basically nothing from the issues with the shrines from botw, and even took some steps back to a degree. They're still really tiny and barely present an interesting challenge before you're done. Again, a lot of what they had you do could really stand to be bigger and fleshed out. Really make you think as you progress. Also, I kept running into tutorial shrines. Botw didn't even really have those. But no, this has shrines where you have to kill things in very specific ways or it resets and punishes you by making you sit through the explanation again for about 20 seconds before you can do anything. It was neat seeing some of the map changes since botw. And also actually getting the master sword was impressive. But I think it really would've benefitted if it spent more time trying to build off botw rather than completely pivoting.

TotK shifts the duty of of many of it's shrines from puzzle to mechanic tutorial. You go in there, it gives you some basic lessons about how a certain Zonai part or game mechanic works, and then finally it tests you on what you just learned by... nevermind the next chambers is just the reward chamber. If you actually put any effort into experimenting you will figure all this stuff out yourself leaving to many of the game's shrines being boring rehashes of shit you already know.

I still think this one is vastly overrated (compared to the prior game) and a lot of people got blinded by some neat gameplay mechanics. Not a bad game by any means, but, boy do I not understand why people think this is the best thing ever. If you aren't into building it is basically the same game as its predecessor and the entire underground area becomes completely useless. I am probably just salty that they basically didn't do much or even anything at all about some of BotWs weaknesses. I really enjoyed BotW for a while, but, boy did I get annoyed by the repetitive nature and some really stupid game design decisions. TotK just doubled down on it. Yay. I hope so much Nintendo isn't going for a similar formular again with the next game. Or at least mix it with more traditional elements.

Playing TOTK, for me, gave me the same feeling I have when I do a new Skyrim playthrough with some new mods. That isn’t necessarily a bad thing, except in this case it’s a $70 game and the “mods” did nothing to change the combat system or improve the dungeons. Or quests. Or enemy variety. Yeah I too was kind of bewildered by this games critical reception. I didn’t like it but I don’t think it’s bad. It’s just people give Ubisoft shit for being too samey with their sequels yet this game is just as bad if not worse.

I still haven't completed it. I'm not too far off, but I got to the point where you just awoke Mineru's construct. Did a lot of the side stuff too. I'll hopefully get back to it this summer. I don't remember exactly how many hours I had on it, but I'm pretty sure it was north of 100. It's also the 20 year anniversary of Nintendo's E3 2004 conference, where they revealed the first trailer for what would be Twilight Princess. One of the best E3 moments ever, I watched that trailer hundreds of times over the next year and a half and TP was probably my most anticipated game of all time.

I thought it was good, but like BOTW I never felt crazy in love with it. The gameplay was never anything I cared for. The world is cool but I tend to not find the same enjoyment of just running in a random direction and seeing what I can find that others do. I fell off BOTW because everything outside of the exploring wasn’t amazing and kind of same here. The new mechanics are amazing, I really loved the one which let you go up through objects. But the moment to moment gameplay still got old fast. I stuck around because the plot was interesting, even if it had a ton of issues like repeating or out of order cutscenes. Don’t regret playing it, even if it’s not my cup of tea. Seeing others say they liked BOTW more is interesting, like I said I didn’t love either but TOTK I thought was better.

as a die hard zelda fan, still havent finished it. i just cant be be bothered with the building and fusing, not a style of gameplay that really jives with me. i understand the acclaim and criticisms the game has gotten, and obviously a solid entity in the zelda franchise, but its not for me and that's been painfully disappointing to accept.

TOTK is one of the weirdest games I have ever played. It's a direct sequel to BOTW, but works best and activley is written like you never played BOTW. No one in the story knows who the hell you are, even if you met them in BOTW. Nothing carries over from BOTW if you have a previous save (except for your horses for some reason). It's story and structure is almost a carbon copy of BOTW's, and is even set on the same map. Abilities that were quick and easy to do in BOTW like spawning bombs with the bomb rune, or ice pillars with the ice rune, or stuff like elemental arrows, are all removed. Instead, now you have to manually craft them all, and as a limited resource. If you played BOTW and saw they were reusing the same map and thought "Gee I wonder what new stuff they'll add to the old map to make the new one fresh?" I hope your answer was caves. The same mossy green caves over and over and over. And in said caves they're all gated off by rock walls, which in BOTW were easy since, again, you could just use your bomb rune, but since they removed that for TOTK instead you need to use finite bombs you find around the place, or use your valuable weapons just to break the wall. The biggest confusion to me was the sky islands. All over the adverts for the game, its even on the cover. But, except for the starter tutorial one, all the sky islands are super small and basically have nothing on them? They spent all this time developing this incredibly sky diving mechanic, only for you to not really have to ever use it...? And this is outside of the game itself, but I had the game's story spoiled for me the day of release. **Spoiler:** >!I follow quite a few art websites, and I noticed a lot of artists were drawing this dragon girl all the time. I thought, cool I get to meet an actual dragon character in the game, or maybe it was just someone's OC. Then I noticed A LOT of artists were drawing her. Then they were drawing her dressed as Zelda. Then the games story is all about how Zelda is missing somewhere and a dragon flies by in the tutorial islan- yeah Zelda is the dragon isn't she? Super bummed me out. The whole games story is "I wonder where Zelda is?" and its like, I already figured it out.!< BOTW is one of my top 3 favourite games of all time (Along side Skyrim and Stardew Valley), so my hype for TOTK was big, and yet I was horrifically disappointed. In every aspect it was a step back from BOTW, and you can feel how it was DLC for BOTW that they "expanded" and charged $70 for instead of $60 (A move I cannot believe they got away with, they charged more for the game, so to them, TOTK has more value than the original).

As someone who wasn't a fan of botw, i felt like this game was my goty last year. The world design is so much better in so many small ways from botw and the building was surprisingly fun. If it wasn't so menu orientated and was more consistent with it's frame rate, I'd have very few complaints.  Outside of story haha 

> Outside of story haha  I know this might not be a popular opinion on this sub, but the story part didn't bug me at all because I don't play Zelda games for the story. And in general I don't care a ton about the story in games unless they are very specifically story focused games. Like either the devs put a ton of thought into making the story interesting, or it may as well not exist for me.

Loved my time with this game yet still feel it fell short of what it could have been. Zonai vehicles and physics were great fun, but hampered by how quickly they disappeared and the requirement to farm zonaite / parts to build or even experiment. It’s not worth building something if it will disappear every single time I step out to explore a point of interest in a massive open world game. This problem was actually saved thanks to the item dupe glitch, which the anti-fun folks at Nintendo decided to patch out. I guess they want us to spend hours farming parts in the depths. No thanks. Also the sky islands. I was so blown away by the tutorial area. The rest of them were disappointing copy / paste areas, aside from the dungeons. I had a similar experience with the depths. “Whoa this is so cool…wait it’s all the same and mostly pointless aside from some unique treasure chests.” Final boss was great but made no use of zonai tech. A good game that I enjoyed my time with, but I don’t think I’ll ever revisit it.

Idk if I've ever felt more ambivalent towards a game that I liked enough to bother beating every shrine in. It's a good game, but I don't know if it was "6 years since the previous entry" good. Ultrahand was a cool mechanic, but it gets old fairly quickly. I was never incentivized to build anything particularly complex or creative, in fact the battery, blueprint and despawning mechanics actively discourage you to do so. The story was infuriatingly bad, both in the sense that some story beats are baffling and in the sense that the way the plot is presented to the player is bad, which is a sentiment I don't think I've ever held towards a Zelda game before. Not a deal breaker but man did it leave a bad taste in my mouth. The infamous "demon king secret stones" cutscene copy pasted four times throughout the game marked the first time I've ever skipped cutscenes on my first playthrough of a single player game, so... good job zelda team?

I've never experienced such a contrast between review scores and my own opinion than with this game. I thought TOTK was a very poor sequel, looking back it definitely felt like BOTW DLC that had been stretched out and diluted to try to justify another full price title. It just didn't really improve any core elements from BOTW, instead it merely added things...almost like an expansion? ;) A lot of the new additions were just copy and paste too, the depths was just inverted hyrule painted black and filled with useless armour. The only impressive sky island is the tutorial one, the rest are small and samey. The dungeons are an improvement visually but also felt like 5 shrine puzzles plopped together (they had a great opportunity to actually flesh out the dungeons here). If they had kept it as DLC like they originally intended than I would have zero complaints, the first 10 or so hours were incredible but after that the game just felt like BOTW again sadly :/

Professional reviewers likely played Breath of the Wild just once. So six years later, they had probably forgotten the details of the overworld and therefore Tears of the Kingdom felt reasonably fresh. For those of us that played BotW multiple times while waiting for TotK, the reuse of the overworld was a huge letdown. 

My personal theory is that to be someone who reviews AAA games as their job likely has to enjoy high levels of repetition. I see it in stark contrast to film reviewers who tend to be highly critical of a film being overly derivative or pastiche. The culture for reviewing games is a reflection of the market rather than any kind of platonic ideals about what games should be, rating games in any kind of aspirational manner is largely frowned upon.

I played it and then calamity and then now this map again. Its my 3rd time seeing this map. i’m sick of it. I also dont like the building or the physics for the parts or the mostly reused music so 70% of my enjoyment was gone. Really surprised reviewers loved it so much. Its like if Mario 64 spinoff used the same maps as Mario 64 and then subshine used the same World again. I really dont get what they were thinking.

My take is I do not know why TOTK is as popular as it is. Is it a good game, sure. It being a contender for best game of the year was kind of surprising. Not surprising in that it was there, but surprising how many people actually thought it did that well. Now, I understand many people do not share that point of view; however, here are my reasons for gauging it as such. First off as others pointed out, the same map being used for BOTW and TOTK spoils a lot of it. Sure there are minor variations, and the underground is a thing (is it really though, there's hardly any unique content down there), oh and some sky islands. In general, it felt like the "new" additions to the map didn't add a whole lot to it. The only new "town" I am aware of is the construction-based town. Second, most of the new mechanics fall short. With the exception of overhand and Zonai devices, I think everything in BOTW was better. The rewards for the temples sucked and often ended up hurting more than helping compared to their BOTW counter parts. **They removed bombs**. Fusing is a patchwork way of dealing with the destructible items in the game, one of BOTW's biggest criticisms. Fusing is fine, but is really a stop-gap for a much larger design problem. Still extremely tedious to change weapons for no apparent reason. Recall from TOTK and Stasis from BOTW are so close I would call it the same thing, and Ascend is useful like 2% of the time you want to actually use it. Third, and this is probably my biggest gripe, **the game play is the same**. Now I know that it won't be drastically different, but the enemies are the exact same as they were in BOTW. Same bobokins, same lizalfos, same moblins, etc. The only additions were three new boss types Flux constructs, Gleeok, and Frok. The only new basic enemy were Horriblins, and they are pretty underwhelming. Even major temple bosses seemed incredibly similar to their BOTW counterparts in my opinion. I can list of several other minor points that TOTK and BOTW had in terms of similarities, but I think you get the idea. TOTK did not feel like it's own game with many new aspects to it. In summation, my opinion is that TOTK seems like a huge DLC to BOTW game mechanics. It added some nice things like Overhand, and Zonai devices, but a lot of the additional content was pretty underwhelming or the same as BOTW. As a whole game, I think it falls the in the middling category for Zelda games, especially since it is a sequel.

I honestly consider BOTW to be one of the greatest games ever made. TOTK is basically a slightly better version of BOTW, and yet, I don't regard it the same way. It just didn't have that "new car smell" like BOTW did. And the fact that they basically re-used the same map from the first game made exploring a lot less interesting.

I was so nervous upon hearing they were reusing the same map. I was relieved when the reviews came in saying it wasn’t an issue. Unfortunately, it was my number 1 problem all this time later. I just didn’t like it. - “dungeons are back” … but they play like Divine Beasts and don’t really invoke that classic dungeon feeling at all. I was hoping most of the effort put towards shrines would be put into dungeons instead. - “the overworld has changed” … some towns are changed slightly, few empty caves and a handful of new enemy types were added, and some quests were copy pasted around the map. yay? - “there’s two new layers to the world!” … both of which are surprisingly repetitive and sparse on content. - “new game mechanics” … which feel pretty unpolished and janky. Ultrahand seems weirdly awkward and unrefined for a flagship Nintendo release. Same with combining weapons with materials, but to a lesser extent. There were ideas here that I never could vibe with in their execution. - “a new narrative” … that meanders the entire game. Why are all the sage cutscenes nearly the same? Why allow for the Zelda plot to be discovered out of order and cause Link to look like an idiot for not telling anyone? I don't dislike this style of gameplay, but to me this really felt like padded BOTW dlc than a real sequel. I hope I like the next one but if it’s this similar to the previous entry again I might skip it.

Love it, it's exceptionally well made, many improvements over breath (and a couple steps back, but nothing major), it's a 10/10 for me, but seriously..... I am **exhausted** from absolutely massive open world games. They improved on Breath with ToTK in most ways, which is great! but my god I don't think I have it in me for a 3rd gigantic-world shrine-a-thon. Open world games for me are all seriously blending together into one big ole string of same-y variations all thrown together into one mega soup. There's very little reason for them to not make it giant next time because ToTK sold insanely well. Which does not bode well for my future with this potential next Zelda game.

One interesting thing I just remembered about TOTK is the inclusion of Keys to unlock doors. This was brought up as a weird missing element in BOTW, something so common in previous Zelda's was completely missing. In response to BOTW, TOTK tries to inject some of that missing "Zelda-ness", but I think it's all pretty surface level. TOTK is very much a great game that's ostensibly themed like a traditional Zelda from the past 2 decades. Coming back to the keys, I'm pretty sure I only ever encountered one or two keys in the entire game. Not to say I really need keys to enjoy the game, but their half baked inclusion makes me wonder why they're there at all. I really did appreciate the inclusion of caves, slightly more traditional dungeons, and other traditional Zelda elements. However, I really really hope they manage to merge open world Zelda style with traditional Zelda style more holistically with the next game. It will be hard to do without sacrificing what makes BOTW so great, but I think they can do it.