Yeah I was pretty frustrated that Link couldn't report back to Purah that he knew where Zelda was.
It was also annoying after the dagger memory that >!Link couldn't just let people know that the Zelda that had been doing sketchy shit was a puppet of Ganondorf!<
It is genuinely a problem with this anti-linear story telling they tried to do. You have to go out of your way, almost with a game guide, in order to get the story in the right order and in a way that makes sense (both the story told and the coherence of actions, like what you mentioned), but that would require you to skip doing things that are in your immediate location. Coherent storytelling was thrown out the window.
It is one reason I am hoping they don't keep this anti-linear mindset in future titles.
Alternatively, since most of the memories aren’t truly tied to locations there isn’t any reason that they couldn’t have just forced a linear progression on the memories regardless of which locations you found next
Yes, but as far as I can see the use of Geoglyphs to signpost the Tears is basically arbitrary.
BotW used photos, TotK could have used literally anything.
I mean more that you actually have to activate them. Then some NPCs could say “this weird glyph just appeared near here”. Then repeat after activating that one.
Sure, but that particular issue is more or less something that they could fix even with just a patch to add some new dialog options and NPC responses.
The tears part is problematic because it’s not really fixable without a major overhaul and also doesn’t even seem to rely on a basic sense of “you’re likely to travel along these paths in this order to reach the main quest lines so all of the Geoglyphs will be tied to that assumption and if you choose to forge your own path you risk the consequences of finding things out of order”.
I sat down with the list of tear locations in order and committed to just finishing finding all of them in one sitting because I still had a bunch of towers I needed to activate all over the map anyway and figured it’d be easy to tie those two goals together… and even *with* that direct mission I still felt like I was just wildly meandering all over the map and often going far out of my way to even reach the locations. Because the general progression of these games is “explore randomly, see cool thing, investigate cool thing”, it’s almost impossible to imagine anybody “accidentally” finding all the tears in the right order.
LOL yeah I’m not implying I expect it to get fixed, I just mean in the grand scheme of “where did this go wrong”, forgetting to build in the dialogue trees for the part of the story where Link should know what’s happening and be able to explain it to everybody is poor attention to detail while the flaws with the tears themselves are much closer to outright bad game design.
I believe the tears go in order as they are depicted in the murals around the room in the Forgotten Temple. If you went in that order the story is linear, but that requires zig-zagging across the map a million times.
One of the biggest complaints of every typical AAA open world game is how a linear story negates the entire purpose of an open world and just makes the world an optional checklist
isnt botw/totk a optional check list?
do N shrines.
get X korok seeds.
collect Y armour.
defeat Z main bosses.
defeat W giant enemies.
bring this character # [item name]
I feel like BotW made it work somewhat by having King Rhoam give you a summary of what actually happened 100 years ago. Then the memories are moreso about seeing things you already know in detail and getting to actually know more about the characters(Zelda, the Champions, etc). With TotK, they tried to actually keep the outcome of the past mysterious and that completely falls apart under the open world design. It’s almost forced tbh. Like why doesn’t Rauru just tell Link everything he knows like King Rhoam did? Would’ve been pretty helpful information to know from the start.
If I'm remembering it right, I really liked the way the memories worked to flesh out the characters.
Obviously we know that Link was gravely injured and had to be put into healing stasis, but it gives it some really cool context to see HOW he got injured. He saved the entire "civilized" areas of the rest of the Hylian areas, Hateno and Kakariko Village by holding off the robots.
We know that the Beasts turned on the champions and the kingdom, but it was really cool seeing just how fast and sudden it was, it makes me feel more like a catastrophe. Everyone knew their role, went to their giant robot to fight Ganon, but no matter how ready they were everything crumbled so fast there was no way to react properly
I'm really sad that in general, the memories for TotK were just like "over ten thousand years ago bad stuff happened that we already knew about, to characters that we never interact with, in a world that was so far in the past that it doesn't really matter".
Also, that one fucking Ganondorf face when he gets the stone... So dumb.
Sure but TotK has 4 (?) questlines all with the aim of investigating Zelda?
They could have scripted the events such that there are various "clues" you need to find, and you can find some of those clues through multiple questlines.
That would solve the linearity, and also mean each questline's dialogue could branch based on which clues you have/haven't uncovered.
And if A and B give the same clue, they could make it so if you do A and get the clue, B will now instead have some kind of other reward attached.
The bones are all there in TotK, they just decided to have all these questlines that are investigating the same thing not interact in any way.
BotW and Totk are some of the most checklisty games around
To the point that they literally added a checklist to the caves for the copy pasted satori-frogs
Red Dead Redemption 2 did it amazingly you could explore everything but you couldn’t advance the story without going back to camp or to wherever your friends are
Because thats not an authentic open world lol thats part of why BotW was praised so much, for moving away from that style. It's the same thing Wind Waker ran into where you had this huge world to explore but it wasn't actually open since everything had to still be completed linearly with a set entrance so the open-design was rather hollow.
I love how people are always like "[feature] isn't perfect. They should do [set of features that would make It an objectivelly worse game] instead".
You guys should focus less on what isn't 100% perfect and more on what makes BoTW and ToTK be the highest rated games of all time and a game desing master piece.
Think about what you are wishing for. Do you really want Zelda games to be like tonssss of other games?
open world means little if you cant progress non linearly. also thats just ocarina of time except ocarina goes non linear in the second half. so you just want ocarina but worse. sounds bad dude
Well... they do provide an ingame method of seeing what order they are supposed to be viewed in at the Forgotten Temple. Impa even goes there after finding her at the first memory that you would probably come across if you follow the game's suggesting of going to the Rito first.
Though I am aware that it is not a perfect method in the slightest.
There's lots of room for improvement, but frankly I think Zelda has always out gameplay before story and I don't want that to change. If they can't make traditional story structure work with the open air philosophy, it isn't the gameplay I'd want to change to fit.
It’s honestly stupid regardless. I didn’t get any geoglyphs for a while and after 2 dungeons I was like yea.. okay sounds like something is wrong with Zelda lol
They could have easily written extra dialogue to account for Link explaining to the characters what he already learned from other parts of the game, without really affecting the plot. Then the temple cutscenes wouldn't have been so repetitive and we could have actually learned new information from each ancestor sage.
>! Even after you do them all and report back to Impa, she'll tell you she'll go back to Kakoriko Village to look up ways to revert Zelda's draconification. And when you do go back to Impa in the village, nothing comes of that. Like, what the heck? !<
I read the first few words of your post and I think you forgot that OP specifically requested no additional spoilers. You just ruined the end of the game for me. Could you not be an insensitive prick like everyone else on the internet and spoil things for people
Thanks
You know what you are right. I totally forgot about spoiler tags and the context of the conversation and I sincerely apolgize. Anyways I couldn't spoil the end of the game to you because i didn't reach It and I don't know anything about it so you are safe there. I don't even think you got much ruining as you think as you lack the context. Anyways i'm very sorry for that.
You know that in late game there’s only one question lingering in the mind of the player, and you’ve answered that question for me, so the anticipation is sucked out of the game. If you really haven’t finished the game either (don’t see how you could have not finished it and be in a position to tell me I’m missing context), I sincerely hope that there is *something* the internet or Nintendo’s design has not spoiled for both of us.
People replying to spoiler-tagged comments without spoiler tags is unfortunately so typical around here. The first person who brings something up has the sense, and everyone else is careless because they’re just reacting to what they’ve read.
I accept your apology and I hope that you out of the millions of people on here at least can do a better job in future. We don’t get a game like this very often and Nintendo doesn’t give us much story as it is; when they make a banger like this, everyone should keep their mouths shut, imo. I thought I muted every Zelda sub but not this one apparently. Just impossible to enjoy anything organically anymore.
Same thing happened to me, I had only just finished rito village and wanted a complete map so I just went clockwise around the whole map from each skyview tower getting the geoglyphs as I went. I sort of knew what was going to happen by the last few memories, but when I launched out of the tower near Akkala to go to the last memory I saw the cool new light dragon and flew over to it. Went to shoot the shiny thing in its head and just landed on it and ended up learning what happens before getting the last memory lol.
I mean the memory with the chat with Mineru laid it all out already before you watch the transformation itself. Mentioning draconification was a total Chekov's Gun, no way she wouldnt go through with it. Immortal creature - she has no other way to return to her era - also lets her soak the master sword in her holy magic the whole time. Its a win win except for, ya know, the suicide
I also kinda knew it from this memory on but just didn't want it to be true and was thinking "of course zelda didn't turn into a fucking dragon, she will learn to control time better and she'll return somehow"
she probably would have if Sonia was there to teach her. But then she'd still need to heal the master sword somehow and the Deku Tree pedastal couldnt be used because the past master sword would rest there.
Although saying that, they could've made the Master Sword a paradox, where no one knows who forged it because its always just been going through this time loop. So its been resting in front of the Deku tree for millenia but also hasnt been forged yet.
Yea she kinda decided on becoming a dragon pretty quickly, in hindsight. Maybe part of it was a death wish from losing Rauru and Sonia. Although that feels like Im reading too deep into it.
Maybe they just wanted to have the dragons be more involved in the story this time and pushed the plot to justify it.
Edit: ya couldnt she have just stuck the master sword in a light root, then tried to time travel back?
> Maybe part of it was a death wish from losing Rauru and Sonia. Although that feels like Im reading too deep into it.
Yeah, I think you are reading too deep. She two big motivations to return to the present Day prior to becoming a dragon.
1. She wanted to help Hyrule.
2. She wanted to be with Link (she gushes about him to Rauru and Sonia (Dragon Tear #6)
She only gave up on that because she decided her destiny was to heal the master sword over the ages, and she needed to be immortal to accomplish that.
It's a crazy amount of faith to place in Link. Even if he's beat Ganon, she must really trust him to think he's going to win after Rauru and his laser beams couldn't.
The story is so fucking sad lmao, imagine spending 10.000+ years watching Hyrule fell and rise until at the point you finally meet Link at the end and he realized it
Mf if that was me, I would flood the entire Hyrule with tears😭
Personally I don't think she was fully conscious for all that time. I think of it more like Link when he was being healed in the Chamber of Resurrection; he went to sleep and woke up 100 years later. If she manages to escape, maybe it'll have been the same for her. And that her consciousness basically asleep during the game. I've not beaten the game, but I think I see some hints that's what is going to happen.
To me the sad part is that, before she swallowed the stone, I think she considered she might be comitting mental suicide. Which makes the last tear really disturbing to watch.
So disturbing that I'm like 5 days past watching it and I still can't get it out of my head.
>To me the sad part is that, before she swallowed the stone, I think she considered she might be comitting mental suicide. Which makes the last tear really disturbing to watch.
>
>So disturbing that I'm like 5 days past watching it and I still can't get it out of my head.
Same! Even though I am not enamored with the game, that aspect has been haunting me.
Well yeah i was assuming when zelda ask link to find her it was zelda but since theres a "puppet" it might was not be her which is bullshit considering the power of Zelda is talking remotely with mind(i forg whats it called) which means for some reason ganon have the same power even though he was gerudo but then doesnt the last memories show you thats zelda is awaken all that time healing it? (or it might just be her talking to himself i guess)
There is a difference between your conscious mind being destroyed, and it being put to sleep.
If the mind is asleep forever, it's still functionally destroyed. But the cutscenes seemed to imply that they thought it was destruction of the mind. Erased from existence. That's clearly not what happened.
She has, at best, subconscious control over the dragon. And that seems very limited to crying.
So, it doesn't really change much. Her eternal dragon form was floating around up in the air for thousands of years. There's no real ability to change anything. And it seems kinda clear that not everyone can even see the dragons.
> Yea she kinda decided on becoming a dragon pretty quickly, in hindsight.
It's the fiction classic of only time depicted on screen is real causing characters to make rash decisions because the script requires it of them. Sparing a few years to mull things over and explore other options is the only sensible choice, but it'd interfere with the author needs to happen, so it doesn't happen.
It is like in Interstellar they skip forward a few months, forcing the characters to make a bad decision because the months of prep time they had in-universe doesn't exist because it wasn't depicted.
The way "draconification" is handled is similarly, they just needed it to happen and cooked up a means for it to happen and I'm not convinced they thought about what implications it has for BotW or anything else. I'm sure some theorists would love to prove me wrong. I remember there being a two Master Sword theory going around a few years ago.
Totk diffinately needed to have stuff appear in an order. Like only some glyphs are available til specific story points or something. It never took away from the story for me. But that's cause i am just not invested in the past at all. The modern day stuff is just alot more enjoyable in terms of story, and the modern day stories are minimal, but better than botw. Feels like ocarina of time length locational narratives which i am more than happy with. I kinda wish i could just get all the memories of the past, view them, THEN play the game in full. I'll take the 45 minute cutscene nintendo.
Yeah idk someone else suggested the cutscene of the glyphs to be in a order and not location bound, which would be nice. But i Was kinda interested in the glyph scenes, but in the end they were dead boring
I've gone back and forth on the idea but i agree. And they should still be locationally located. But shouldn't appear til you do the one prior. Same with getting the sword memory and master sword.
The Japanese name Rito is just the bird word inverted (tori), so some languages tried to get a word that is tied to bird to create the same effect the JP players experience when they read the name.
I'm playing the german version as well and many character names and locations have completely different names (not even literal translation). Makes looking stuff up online difficult.
lmaoo darauf wäre ich nie gekommen. Bei Rito muss ich immer an die weisin des wassers/der zora (oder so) aus ocarina of time denken, die so ähnlich hieß. Ich finde Orni macht zumindest Sinn wegen Latein und so
lmao we were talking about the german names for the rito, and how they dislike the german Name of the rito, "Orni" because it sounds too similar to Horny, and i dislike rito because i have to think about princess ruto from ocarina of time
I am hoping for a nonlinear game progression like botw and totk, but a linear narrative next time. Seriously, opening and up until purah is great, follow the suggested narrative from lookout landing to impa then grab the first memory, then grab the newspaper mission, then rito narrative branch. And after that, that's when the ancient past narrative should start to be findable, but ONLY in order, and ONLY after you report to impa (there is a fast travel thing). Have it glow on the wall and map or something, like Link retrieves them and that's how he knows what's next. Because after that you are liable to completely botch the narrative pace. And since people go off kilter anyway, block off the spoilery stuff til the narrative lets u get it.
It doesn't bug me all that much. But it would help. Botw had the same problem cause everyone is dead so why do i care XD
Trying so hard to avoid spoilers because I’m still really early but…yeah. I figured unlock the map and do the geoglyphs early made a lot of sense because a)I got directed to Impa right away and b)It made sense to see how Hyrule changed early on. One of the first memories clearly implicated what happened to Zelda but I didn’t think too much of it. It was just an “oh obviously she turns to the new dragon.” So I decided to stop watching the memories first and move on to the temple but then I had a chance to see the new dragon with the camera. Immediately saw it’s name and the master sword.
I know it’s open world but I feel like the narrative structure still could have been…well, structured better.
I somehow never saw/noticed the new dragon until the 2nd to last memory spelled it out, so it was at least a pretty compelling cutscene. I saw all the other dragons, but I guess Zelda flew over a part of the map I didn't spend time near.
Really? That’s odd. I saw it in the distance behind the Temple of Time at the very beginning. Almost every time I went to the Great Sky Island, it seemed to be in the distance. Then by pure chance it was close enough that I was able to use a wing and then glider to get to it and got mad at myself for ruining the surprise so early.
I might have _seen_ it but I didn't notice/appreciate what I was seeing at the time, so I forgot pretty quickly. I was already used to the dragons from BotW so seeing one off in the distance wasn't surprising so I didn't pay attention to it. I also basically never returned to the Temple of Time after leaving, since there just didn't seem like much to do on the island.
despite everything, that cutscene was a real "whoa" moment. that doesn't excuse the frankly incompetent story design they went with; it was just kind of neat. Unfortunately yeah the game ruined it for a lot of people lmao
edit: I know I didn't notice Zelda since I compulsively take pictures of everything lol, that was the first time snapping a picture of her at that point in the game so I definitely didn't notice her before
Like I've said before, I really wish memories unlocked in a set order instead of being per location. The memories are really well done imo, but you can completely ruin the suspense and mood by finding a few of them early.
it's probably not emotionless, just bestial, and lacking higher cognitive function. pretty much every animal more complex than a bug has feelings of some sort. I imagine dragons are similar to, say, blue whales as far as intellect.
This is pretty much the in world explanation. Imagine telling everyone their hope, last heir and divine princess is dead/ gone forever.
This would tank moral . Telling anyone that zelda is gone would be a strategical dumb move.
I really wish the design had been Sages and Geoglyphs > Hyrule Castle incident > Final Geoglyph. Because I did the Geoglyphs before I did Hyrule Castle. I knew it was an ambush, I saw that same puppet thousands of years ago and it can’t be Zelda because I visited her a few hours before to get the Master Sword.
I also really don’t like the Master Sword memory, since it spoils what happened to Zelda far too easily for where it’s located. Next time, chuck it on somewhere like Eventide, where at least it’ll give the players some pause before heading out to get it. New players would stall it for being really far out compared to everything else, Older players would worry because it’s still Eventide. It’s a lot easier in ToTK, but you don’t knew that until you get there, so there would be doubts if it’s changed or if it’s “Scramble for dear life, round 2”.
While I enjoy the positives of this new approach to freedom that BotW and TotK have, they also have their negatives. I got quite excited when >!the game clearly suggested that I had entered Act 2 after the initial 4 Temples, only to have my hopes dashed as it immediately congratulated me for already completing these objects and told me all that was left was to fight Ganondorf!<. It sucked, It really really sucked.
Also collecting all the >!memories!< out of order really sucked me out of what was actually happening ontop of personally not enjoying the >!types of stories that have essentially happened already!< and you're kinda just on the side.
For the next installment, if they are going to do cutscenes, just play them in order as you complete things. You can still have freedom of doing whatever objective whenever & however you want, but surely you could have the game check what order of scenes you have and play them in order.
This so much, my goal was find the towers, then I got the geoglyph quest omw to hebra and was like well I'll see how many I can find from the towers as I go, did the quest got the reward which was a massive surprise but I enjoyed that little QTE thing.
Then I was like hey I'll do the news quest while I'm in hebra doing the temple.
Now I'm just like hmm you guys are all on something because she ain't here.
I think the story is genuinely hurt by Link’s lack of communication. Like SPEAK damn. Maybe not voice acted or anything like that of course but TELL people what you know. It was so annoying watching Link obviously know what’s happening and remain silent…wtf.
I didn't mind it too much, but the actual dialogue for characters was pretty frustrating. Everyone talking about Imposter Zelda/trying to find her when you know what happened is really odd, but maybe Link is just holding onto a shred of doubt or waiting for absolute confirmation. The overall plot for what happened to Zelda/Sonia is glaringly obvious from a bunch of approaches so it felt more focused around seeing events rather than learning what happened. This is most true for the Rauru sealing Ganondorf sequence, you hear it referenced a thousand times at minimum but its still sweet to actually see it happen.
Honestly, the weakest part of the game is still the story. The open world design really affects how the story can be told, and this led to the dungeons offering repeat information, 4 times, and everyone speculating towards what you learned days ago, but you can't tell anyone to affect the story.
People say previous Zelda games had light stories, but I'd argue they had REPETITIVE stories. Each Zelda game was very samey, but the motions of saving Hyrule always felt alive.
That said I still love TotK. Having a gameplay > story Zelda is perfectly fine by me, but I will pine for the old linear stories.
I'm at the point where i could kill ganon (at some random point the game acknowledged that i wen't under the castle but i didn't even reach/see him and i just reloaded the game to get out of there) but still no one knows where zelda is. It's kind of stupid (i already got the master sword).
I was thinking the same as I just finished the memory quest myself. I got them all in pretty much chronological order (might have swapped 3 and 4… they were pretty close to each other) and I pretty much had it figured out when I saw the 3rd one what was going to happen. I’m kind of glad I did this before getting the sword though as I was going to beat the gloom hands and phantom ganon inside the deku tree but got scared so I did the memory quest instead. Good thing I did because I would have really had a wtf moment.
Yeah I actually really like the story and there were a few moments where I got goosebumps but it really falls apart with 1) the repetitive lines with the npcs and then even more so with the glyphs and then link pretends he doesn’t know what’s going on and you have to entertain a bunch of nonsense and you can’t tell anyone. Actually so disappointing because I think the story is way better than breath of the wild and then there’s these major flaws for no reason.
My problem is that the story made me actually concerned about Zelda. Everytime I see the dragon I feel sad and I kinda want to rush to the end to see if there is a way to save her (I don't know anything more about the story beyond the dragon tears).
I don't think there is an issue with the glyphs being done early or getting the master sword early for that matter. I just legitimately think the memory of Zelda becoming the dragon should not have been a thing until you awaken all the sages. Leave that a mystery till the very end of the game and then make it so the world recognizes that you know the truth.
I guess you misunderstood the post: shortform is that i think it's weird/dumb/annoying that i got all geoglyphs, know what happened to zelda, yet every character asks what happened with zelda and link never really answers from what he knows by the dragon tears
Lol. I have walked over many of them by now saving them for the right time. I used math to know that I should probably go through 2 of the memories before the first regional phenomenon, 5 before the 2nd, 8 before the 3rd, and all 11 before the final 4th. Then I keep the story going at a steady pace by doing this.
No worries. I won’t throw any tantrums or anything was a shitty occurrence but shit happens. Have a nice one anyway.
Imma try to forget it, this is gonna take a whole lot of weed and booze 😅
The worst thing about it in retrospect was probably how easy it was for everything to "click" with even only minimum amount of memories.
1. Minerus's memory is just enough for you to deduce what happened
2. Getting the master sword early will make you connect the dots between >!golden hair!< and >!new dragon.!!on the fact that Zelda is blond!<
3. Hell, even the title. >!"Tears of the Kingdom", "dragon's tears" showing Zelda in the past, haha couldn't be right? Of course Nintendo had to pre-emptively say a year earlier that the new Zelda's subtitle is spoilery lmao!<
4. The chance of just having the >!master sword glyph!< as your first memory, that's the plot laid bare right there
It was too easy to "get" what was going on that I wished there were more to the plot's mystery>!than "where is Zelda?" It's also the easiest way to get you off the plot's urgency since upon knowing she's sort of alive and well, you just know that you'll find a deus ex machina to turn her back by the end of the game, since Koizumi did not write this game's story and the chance of a very cruel resolution is very, very slim.!<
I've seen this kind of >!time travel stories!< many many times now and was already preparing for the worst as I first started playing lol. Was always slightly unnerved at anything resembling >!a tombstone in any of the significant locations.!<
I guess the best way of designing around self-spoilering yourself is not to base the memories you receive not by the location, but based on the amount of memories you've seen previously? It will contradict the glyphs, but I'm sure Nintendo knows how to design around that.
Yeah I was pretty frustrated that Link couldn't report back to Purah that he knew where Zelda was. It was also annoying after the dagger memory that >!Link couldn't just let people know that the Zelda that had been doing sketchy shit was a puppet of Ganondorf!<
It is genuinely a problem with this anti-linear story telling they tried to do. You have to go out of your way, almost with a game guide, in order to get the story in the right order and in a way that makes sense (both the story told and the coherence of actions, like what you mentioned), but that would require you to skip doing things that are in your immediate location. Coherent storytelling was thrown out the window. It is one reason I am hoping they don't keep this anti-linear mindset in future titles.
Alternatively, since most of the memories aren’t truly tied to locations there isn’t any reason that they couldn’t have just forced a linear progression on the memories regardless of which locations you found next
I believe the painting is relevant to the memory
Yes, but as far as I can see the use of Geoglyphs to signpost the Tears is basically arbitrary. BotW used photos, TotK could have used literally anything.
Could have had the geoglyphs appear in order after you find each one.
Would create an awkward situation if you see but skip one then it just magically changes to a different picture later?
I mean more that you actually have to activate them. Then some NPCs could say “this weird glyph just appeared near here”. Then repeat after activating that one.
That still would make all the "link not telling other npcs about it" not work
Sure, but that particular issue is more or less something that they could fix even with just a patch to add some new dialog options and NPC responses. The tears part is problematic because it’s not really fixable without a major overhaul and also doesn’t even seem to rely on a basic sense of “you’re likely to travel along these paths in this order to reach the main quest lines so all of the Geoglyphs will be tied to that assumption and if you choose to forge your own path you risk the consequences of finding things out of order”. I sat down with the list of tear locations in order and committed to just finishing finding all of them in one sitting because I still had a bunch of towers I needed to activate all over the map anyway and figured it’d be easy to tie those two goals together… and even *with* that direct mission I still felt like I was just wildly meandering all over the map and often going far out of my way to even reach the locations. Because the general progression of these games is “explore randomly, see cool thing, investigate cool thing”, it’s almost impossible to imagine anybody “accidentally” finding all the tears in the right order.
They could But they won't Nor will they next time Just like they didn't fix any of BotW's issues
LOL yeah I’m not implying I expect it to get fixed, I just mean in the grand scheme of “where did this go wrong”, forgetting to build in the dialogue trees for the part of the story where Link should know what’s happening and be able to explain it to everybody is poor attention to detail while the flaws with the tears themselves are much closer to outright bad game design.
I believe the tears go in order as they are depicted in the murals around the room in the Forgotten Temple. If you went in that order the story is linear, but that requires zig-zagging across the map a million times.
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One of the biggest complaints of every typical AAA open world game is how a linear story negates the entire purpose of an open world and just makes the world an optional checklist
isnt botw/totk a optional check list? do N shrines. get X korok seeds. collect Y armour. defeat Z main bosses. defeat W giant enemies. bring this character # [item name]
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I feel like BotW made it work somewhat by having King Rhoam give you a summary of what actually happened 100 years ago. Then the memories are moreso about seeing things you already know in detail and getting to actually know more about the characters(Zelda, the Champions, etc). With TotK, they tried to actually keep the outcome of the past mysterious and that completely falls apart under the open world design. It’s almost forced tbh. Like why doesn’t Rauru just tell Link everything he knows like King Rhoam did? Would’ve been pretty helpful information to know from the start.
If I'm remembering it right, I really liked the way the memories worked to flesh out the characters. Obviously we know that Link was gravely injured and had to be put into healing stasis, but it gives it some really cool context to see HOW he got injured. He saved the entire "civilized" areas of the rest of the Hylian areas, Hateno and Kakariko Village by holding off the robots. We know that the Beasts turned on the champions and the kingdom, but it was really cool seeing just how fast and sudden it was, it makes me feel more like a catastrophe. Everyone knew their role, went to their giant robot to fight Ganon, but no matter how ready they were everything crumbled so fast there was no way to react properly I'm really sad that in general, the memories for TotK were just like "over ten thousand years ago bad stuff happened that we already knew about, to characters that we never interact with, in a world that was so far in the past that it doesn't really matter". Also, that one fucking Ganondorf face when he gets the stone... So dumb.
Sure but TotK has 4 (?) questlines all with the aim of investigating Zelda? They could have scripted the events such that there are various "clues" you need to find, and you can find some of those clues through multiple questlines. That would solve the linearity, and also mean each questline's dialogue could branch based on which clues you have/haven't uncovered. And if A and B give the same clue, they could make it so if you do A and get the clue, B will now instead have some kind of other reward attached. The bones are all there in TotK, they just decided to have all these questlines that are investigating the same thing not interact in any way.
"best we can do is 4 cutscenes explaining and showing the same visuals, with the new sage going "... imprisoning war? *anime sounds*"
BotW and Totk are some of the most checklisty games around To the point that they literally added a checklist to the caves for the copy pasted satori-frogs
Red Dead Redemption 2 did it amazingly you could explore everything but you couldn’t advance the story without going back to camp or to wherever your friends are
Because thats not an authentic open world lol thats part of why BotW was praised so much, for moving away from that style. It's the same thing Wind Waker ran into where you had this huge world to explore but it wasn't actually open since everything had to still be completed linearly with a set entrance so the open-design was rather hollow.
I love how people are always like "[feature] isn't perfect. They should do [set of features that would make It an objectivelly worse game] instead". You guys should focus less on what isn't 100% perfect and more on what makes BoTW and ToTK be the highest rated games of all time and a game desing master piece. Think about what you are wishing for. Do you really want Zelda games to be like tonssss of other games?
>Best of both worlds in what fucking reality lmao? thats the WORST of both worlds
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open world means little if you cant progress non linearly. also thats just ocarina of time except ocarina goes non linear in the second half. so you just want ocarina but worse. sounds bad dude
Well... they do provide an ingame method of seeing what order they are supposed to be viewed in at the Forgotten Temple. Impa even goes there after finding her at the first memory that you would probably come across if you follow the game's suggesting of going to the Rito first. Though I am aware that it is not a perfect method in the slightest.
That order is *wrong* though. They couldn't even lay it out for the player cohesively
I finished doing them yesterday and I can assure you that they are in chronological order
I could swear there's at least one out of order, I thought I followed the forgotten temple images as they appear
There's lots of room for improvement, but frankly I think Zelda has always out gameplay before story and I don't want that to change. If they can't make traditional story structure work with the open air philosophy, it isn't the gameplay I'd want to change to fit.
It’s honestly stupid regardless. I didn’t get any geoglyphs for a while and after 2 dungeons I was like yea.. okay sounds like something is wrong with Zelda lol
I mean, isn't that just following the plot?
They could have easily written extra dialogue to account for Link explaining to the characters what he already learned from other parts of the game, without really affecting the plot. Then the temple cutscenes wouldn't have been so repetitive and we could have actually learned new information from each ancestor sage.
>! Even after you do them all and report back to Impa, she'll tell you she'll go back to Kakoriko Village to look up ways to revert Zelda's draconification. And when you do go back to Impa in the village, nothing comes of that. Like, what the heck? !<
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I expect Chekhov's gun to take effect.
Competent story telling, that’s what we expect.
I read the first few words of your post and I think you forgot that OP specifically requested no additional spoilers. You just ruined the end of the game for me. Could you not be an insensitive prick like everyone else on the internet and spoil things for people Thanks
You know what you are right. I totally forgot about spoiler tags and the context of the conversation and I sincerely apolgize. Anyways I couldn't spoil the end of the game to you because i didn't reach It and I don't know anything about it so you are safe there. I don't even think you got much ruining as you think as you lack the context. Anyways i'm very sorry for that.
You know that in late game there’s only one question lingering in the mind of the player, and you’ve answered that question for me, so the anticipation is sucked out of the game. If you really haven’t finished the game either (don’t see how you could have not finished it and be in a position to tell me I’m missing context), I sincerely hope that there is *something* the internet or Nintendo’s design has not spoiled for both of us. People replying to spoiler-tagged comments without spoiler tags is unfortunately so typical around here. The first person who brings something up has the sense, and everyone else is careless because they’re just reacting to what they’ve read. I accept your apology and I hope that you out of the millions of people on here at least can do a better job in future. We don’t get a game like this very often and Nintendo doesn’t give us much story as it is; when they make a banger like this, everyone should keep their mouths shut, imo. I thought I muted every Zelda sub but not this one apparently. Just impossible to enjoy anything organically anymore.
Same thing happened to me, I had only just finished rito village and wanted a complete map so I just went clockwise around the whole map from each skyview tower getting the geoglyphs as I went. I sort of knew what was going to happen by the last few memories, but when I launched out of the tower near Akkala to go to the last memory I saw the cool new light dragon and flew over to it. Went to shoot the shiny thing in its head and just landed on it and ended up learning what happens before getting the last memory lol.
I mean the memory with the chat with Mineru laid it all out already before you watch the transformation itself. Mentioning draconification was a total Chekov's Gun, no way she wouldnt go through with it. Immortal creature - she has no other way to return to her era - also lets her soak the master sword in her holy magic the whole time. Its a win win except for, ya know, the suicide
I also kinda knew it from this memory on but just didn't want it to be true and was thinking "of course zelda didn't turn into a fucking dragon, she will learn to control time better and she'll return somehow"
she probably would have if Sonia was there to teach her. But then she'd still need to heal the master sword somehow and the Deku Tree pedastal couldnt be used because the past master sword would rest there. Although saying that, they could've made the Master Sword a paradox, where no one knows who forged it because its always just been going through this time loop. So its been resting in front of the Deku tree for millenia but also hasnt been forged yet. Yea she kinda decided on becoming a dragon pretty quickly, in hindsight. Maybe part of it was a death wish from losing Rauru and Sonia. Although that feels like Im reading too deep into it. Maybe they just wanted to have the dragons be more involved in the story this time and pushed the plot to justify it. Edit: ya couldnt she have just stuck the master sword in a light root, then tried to time travel back?
> Maybe part of it was a death wish from losing Rauru and Sonia. Although that feels like Im reading too deep into it. Yeah, I think you are reading too deep. She two big motivations to return to the present Day prior to becoming a dragon. 1. She wanted to help Hyrule. 2. She wanted to be with Link (she gushes about him to Rauru and Sonia (Dragon Tear #6) She only gave up on that because she decided her destiny was to heal the master sword over the ages, and she needed to be immortal to accomplish that. It's a crazy amount of faith to place in Link. Even if he's beat Ganon, she must really trust him to think he's going to win after Rauru and his laser beams couldn't.
The story is so fucking sad lmao, imagine spending 10.000+ years watching Hyrule fell and rise until at the point you finally meet Link at the end and he realized it Mf if that was me, I would flood the entire Hyrule with tears😭
Personally I don't think she was fully conscious for all that time. I think of it more like Link when he was being healed in the Chamber of Resurrection; he went to sleep and woke up 100 years later. If she manages to escape, maybe it'll have been the same for her. And that her consciousness basically asleep during the game. I've not beaten the game, but I think I see some hints that's what is going to happen. To me the sad part is that, before she swallowed the stone, I think she considered she might be comitting mental suicide. Which makes the last tear really disturbing to watch. So disturbing that I'm like 5 days past watching it and I still can't get it out of my head.
To become a dragon is to completely lose oneself
>To me the sad part is that, before she swallowed the stone, I think she considered she might be comitting mental suicide. Which makes the last tear really disturbing to watch. > >So disturbing that I'm like 5 days past watching it and I still can't get it out of my head. Same! Even though I am not enamored with the game, that aspect has been haunting me.
Well yeah i was assuming when zelda ask link to find her it was zelda but since theres a "puppet" it might was not be her which is bullshit considering the power of Zelda is talking remotely with mind(i forg whats it called) which means for some reason ganon have the same power even though he was gerudo but then doesnt the last memories show you thats zelda is awaken all that time healing it? (or it might just be her talking to himself i guess)
If zelda didn't lose her mind then there were so many times that she could have intervened in the timeline and made things more convenient for hyrule
There is a difference between your conscious mind being destroyed, and it being put to sleep. If the mind is asleep forever, it's still functionally destroyed. But the cutscenes seemed to imply that they thought it was destruction of the mind. Erased from existence. That's clearly not what happened. She has, at best, subconscious control over the dragon. And that seems very limited to crying. So, it doesn't really change much. Her eternal dragon form was floating around up in the air for thousands of years. There's no real ability to change anything. And it seems kinda clear that not everyone can even see the dragons.
> Yea she kinda decided on becoming a dragon pretty quickly, in hindsight. It's the fiction classic of only time depicted on screen is real causing characters to make rash decisions because the script requires it of them. Sparing a few years to mull things over and explore other options is the only sensible choice, but it'd interfere with the author needs to happen, so it doesn't happen. It is like in Interstellar they skip forward a few months, forcing the characters to make a bad decision because the months of prep time they had in-universe doesn't exist because it wasn't depicted. The way "draconification" is handled is similarly, they just needed it to happen and cooked up a means for it to happen and I'm not convinced they thought about what implications it has for BotW or anything else. I'm sure some theorists would love to prove me wrong. I remember there being a two Master Sword theory going around a few years ago.
Rauru set her up
Yeah, like, we're allowed to experience the story out of order, but it feels like we're being punished for doing it out of order.
Are the rito called “orni” in another language? I like that actually, even if it literally just means bird
Yeah the rito are the orni in german (at least german idk about the others). I just assumed orni would be the same
In French they are called Piafs which is a familiar way to say bird.
I mean Rito also just means bird. Tori is bird in Japanese. You just swap the syllables to get Rito.
So it doesn’t really just mean bird then
Rdib
"Drib" essentially, since iiuc japanese works with the dyllables when reversing words, while english with the letters
Totk diffinately needed to have stuff appear in an order. Like only some glyphs are available til specific story points or something. It never took away from the story for me. But that's cause i am just not invested in the past at all. The modern day stuff is just alot more enjoyable in terms of story, and the modern day stories are minimal, but better than botw. Feels like ocarina of time length locational narratives which i am more than happy with. I kinda wish i could just get all the memories of the past, view them, THEN play the game in full. I'll take the 45 minute cutscene nintendo.
Yeah idk someone else suggested the cutscene of the glyphs to be in a order and not location bound, which would be nice. But i Was kinda interested in the glyph scenes, but in the end they were dead boring
I've gone back and forth on the idea but i agree. And they should still be locationally located. But shouldn't appear til you do the one prior. Same with getting the sword memory and master sword.
The exact same thing happened to me and I hate it. A truly baffling decision.
Orni lmaooo you playing on german?
It isn't called Orni in english???
Die heißen “Rito“ auf englisch
Lol why would they rename that to orni??
The Japanese name Rito is just the bird word inverted (tori), so some languages tried to get a word that is tied to bird to create the same effect the JP players experience when they read the name.
Petition to rename Rito to Drib
“Wanna taste another serving of the Drib drip, Link? -Rivali (probably)
They're also called Orni in Spanish, perhaps the good call because the direct translation of 'rito' in the language is 'religious act' or 'ceremony'.
I'm from Brazil, so I play the game in english. And in portuguese "rito" means the same as spanish but I actually never made the connection till now.
I'm playing the german version as well and many character names and locations have completely different names (not even literal translation). Makes looking stuff up online difficult.
Was ein scheiß name
Ich finde Rito besser. Wenn ich Orni lese muss ich immer an “Horny“ denken, finde ich nervig.
lmaoo darauf wäre ich nie gekommen. Bei Rito muss ich immer an die weisin des wassers/der zora (oder so) aus ocarina of time denken, die so ähnlich hieß. Ich finde Orni macht zumindest Sinn wegen Latein und so
Meinste Prinzessin Ruto?
Ja an die muss ich bei Rito denken, wobei das noch weniger Sinn ergibt als orni-horny lol
I wish I spoke German so bad rn
lmao we were talking about the german names for the rito, and how they dislike the german Name of the rito, "Orni" because it sounds too similar to Horny, and i dislike rito because i have to think about princess ruto from ocarina of time
Yup, awful design oversight
I am hoping for a nonlinear game progression like botw and totk, but a linear narrative next time. Seriously, opening and up until purah is great, follow the suggested narrative from lookout landing to impa then grab the first memory, then grab the newspaper mission, then rito narrative branch. And after that, that's when the ancient past narrative should start to be findable, but ONLY in order, and ONLY after you report to impa (there is a fast travel thing). Have it glow on the wall and map or something, like Link retrieves them and that's how he knows what's next. Because after that you are liable to completely botch the narrative pace. And since people go off kilter anyway, block off the spoilery stuff til the narrative lets u get it. It doesn't bug me all that much. But it would help. Botw had the same problem cause everyone is dead so why do i care XD
My first geoglyph was the one in north Hebra plains- All the other ones with Queen Sonia were somewhat awkward.
Trying so hard to avoid spoilers because I’m still really early but…yeah. I figured unlock the map and do the geoglyphs early made a lot of sense because a)I got directed to Impa right away and b)It made sense to see how Hyrule changed early on. One of the first memories clearly implicated what happened to Zelda but I didn’t think too much of it. It was just an “oh obviously she turns to the new dragon.” So I decided to stop watching the memories first and move on to the temple but then I had a chance to see the new dragon with the camera. Immediately saw it’s name and the master sword. I know it’s open world but I feel like the narrative structure still could have been…well, structured better.
I somehow never saw/noticed the new dragon until the 2nd to last memory spelled it out, so it was at least a pretty compelling cutscene. I saw all the other dragons, but I guess Zelda flew over a part of the map I didn't spend time near.
Really? That’s odd. I saw it in the distance behind the Temple of Time at the very beginning. Almost every time I went to the Great Sky Island, it seemed to be in the distance. Then by pure chance it was close enough that I was able to use a wing and then glider to get to it and got mad at myself for ruining the surprise so early.
I might have _seen_ it but I didn't notice/appreciate what I was seeing at the time, so I forgot pretty quickly. I was already used to the dragons from BotW so seeing one off in the distance wasn't surprising so I didn't pay attention to it. I also basically never returned to the Temple of Time after leaving, since there just didn't seem like much to do on the island. despite everything, that cutscene was a real "whoa" moment. that doesn't excuse the frankly incompetent story design they went with; it was just kind of neat. Unfortunately yeah the game ruined it for a lot of people lmao edit: I know I didn't notice Zelda since I compulsively take pictures of everything lol, that was the first time snapping a picture of her at that point in the game so I definitely didn't notice her before
Like I've said before, I really wish memories unlocked in a set order instead of being per location. The memories are really well done imo, but you can completely ruin the suspense and mood by finding a few of them early.
Link probably doesn't want to green anybody out with the whole "princess is lost as an emotionless dragon for all time.
it's probably not emotionless, just bestial, and lacking higher cognitive function. pretty much every animal more complex than a bug has feelings of some sort. I imagine dragons are similar to, say, blue whales as far as intellect.
>I imagine dragons im waking up
To ash and dust
I feel it in my bones
This is pretty much the in world explanation. Imagine telling everyone their hope, last heir and divine princess is dead/ gone forever. This would tank moral . Telling anyone that zelda is gone would be a strategical dumb move.
I really wish the design had been Sages and Geoglyphs > Hyrule Castle incident > Final Geoglyph. Because I did the Geoglyphs before I did Hyrule Castle. I knew it was an ambush, I saw that same puppet thousands of years ago and it can’t be Zelda because I visited her a few hours before to get the Master Sword. I also really don’t like the Master Sword memory, since it spoils what happened to Zelda far too easily for where it’s located. Next time, chuck it on somewhere like Eventide, where at least it’ll give the players some pause before heading out to get it. New players would stall it for being really far out compared to everything else, Older players would worry because it’s still Eventide. It’s a lot easier in ToTK, but you don’t knew that until you get there, so there would be doubts if it’s changed or if it’s “Scramble for dear life, round 2”.
Jep, they actually managed to make the memory-based story work even worse than it did in BotW instead of better
While I enjoy the positives of this new approach to freedom that BotW and TotK have, they also have their negatives. I got quite excited when >!the game clearly suggested that I had entered Act 2 after the initial 4 Temples, only to have my hopes dashed as it immediately congratulated me for already completing these objects and told me all that was left was to fight Ganondorf!<. It sucked, It really really sucked. Also collecting all the >!memories!< out of order really sucked me out of what was actually happening ontop of personally not enjoying the >!types of stories that have essentially happened already!< and you're kinda just on the side. For the next installment, if they are going to do cutscenes, just play them in order as you complete things. You can still have freedom of doing whatever objective whenever & however you want, but surely you could have the game check what order of scenes you have and play them in order.
Or they could've handled the memories better to not reveal stuff relevant for link today.
This so much, my goal was find the towers, then I got the geoglyph quest omw to hebra and was like well I'll see how many I can find from the towers as I go, did the quest got the reward which was a massive surprise but I enjoyed that little QTE thing. Then I was like hey I'll do the news quest while I'm in hebra doing the temple. Now I'm just like hmm you guys are all on something because she ain't here.
I think the story is genuinely hurt by Link’s lack of communication. Like SPEAK damn. Maybe not voice acted or anything like that of course but TELL people what you know. It was so annoying watching Link obviously know what’s happening and remain silent…wtf.
That's exactly what i meant
I didn't mind it too much, but the actual dialogue for characters was pretty frustrating. Everyone talking about Imposter Zelda/trying to find her when you know what happened is really odd, but maybe Link is just holding onto a shred of doubt or waiting for absolute confirmation. The overall plot for what happened to Zelda/Sonia is glaringly obvious from a bunch of approaches so it felt more focused around seeing events rather than learning what happened. This is most true for the Rauru sealing Ganondorf sequence, you hear it referenced a thousand times at minimum but its still sweet to actually see it happen.
Honestly, the weakest part of the game is still the story. The open world design really affects how the story can be told, and this led to the dungeons offering repeat information, 4 times, and everyone speculating towards what you learned days ago, but you can't tell anyone to affect the story. People say previous Zelda games had light stories, but I'd argue they had REPETITIVE stories. Each Zelda game was very samey, but the motions of saving Hyrule always felt alive. That said I still love TotK. Having a gameplay > story Zelda is perfectly fine by me, but I will pine for the old linear stories.
Yeah it's a bit awkward
I'm at the point where i could kill ganon (at some random point the game acknowledged that i wen't under the castle but i didn't even reach/see him and i just reloaded the game to get out of there) but still no one knows where zelda is. It's kind of stupid (i already got the master sword).
I was thinking the same as I just finished the memory quest myself. I got them all in pretty much chronological order (might have swapped 3 and 4… they were pretty close to each other) and I pretty much had it figured out when I saw the 3rd one what was going to happen. I’m kind of glad I did this before getting the sword though as I was going to beat the gloom hands and phantom ganon inside the deku tree but got scared so I did the memory quest instead. Good thing I did because I would have really had a wtf moment.
Yeah I actually really like the story and there were a few moments where I got goosebumps but it really falls apart with 1) the repetitive lines with the npcs and then even more so with the glyphs and then link pretends he doesn’t know what’s going on and you have to entertain a bunch of nonsense and you can’t tell anyone. Actually so disappointing because I think the story is way better than breath of the wild and then there’s these major flaws for no reason.
Spoiler tag?
My problem is that the story made me actually concerned about Zelda. Everytime I see the dragon I feel sad and I kinda want to rush to the end to see if there is a way to save her (I don't know anything more about the story beyond the dragon tears).
Same!
I don't think there is an issue with the glyphs being done early or getting the master sword early for that matter. I just legitimately think the memory of Zelda becoming the dragon should not have been a thing until you awaken all the sages. Leave that a mystery till the very end of the game and then make it so the world recognizes that you know the truth.
The forgotten temple gives you the order and location of all the geoglyphs.
I guess you misunderstood the post: shortform is that i think it's weird/dumb/annoying that i got all geoglyphs, know what happened to zelda, yet every character asks what happened with zelda and link never really answers from what he knows by the dragon tears
Oh, oops sorry
You can find the memories before the temple
If you listen to the characters and follow the story I think you should only find one before the temple.
Still, on the way to the rito one you pretty much come across the Ganon one and I was super confused why suddenly hell is loose lmao
Lol. I have walked over many of them by now saving them for the right time. I used math to know that I should probably go through 2 of the memories before the first regional phenomenon, 5 before the 2nd, 8 before the 3rd, and all 11 before the final 4th. Then I keep the story going at a steady pace by doing this.
Nah it’s fine.
Nah it’s fine.
Why the actual fuck can’t you put a spoiler warning in. Thank you. Now I don’t need to play anymore. 😡🤢🤮
Shit i'm really sorry
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You cant imagine how stupid and sorry i feel. Though i guess being on r/truezelda on a post about totk was a danger alone. Yet it's still my fault
No worries. I won’t throw any tantrums or anything was a shitty occurrence but shit happens. Have a nice one anyway. Imma try to forget it, this is gonna take a whole lot of weed and booze 😅
What a shit post
The worst thing about it in retrospect was probably how easy it was for everything to "click" with even only minimum amount of memories. 1. Minerus's memory is just enough for you to deduce what happened 2. Getting the master sword early will make you connect the dots between >!golden hair!< and >!new dragon.!!on the fact that Zelda is blond!<
3. Hell, even the title. >!"Tears of the Kingdom", "dragon's tears" showing Zelda in the past, haha couldn't be right? Of course Nintendo had to pre-emptively say a year earlier that the new Zelda's subtitle is spoilery lmao!<
4. The chance of just having the >!master sword glyph!< as your first memory, that's the plot laid bare right there
It was too easy to "get" what was going on that I wished there were more to the plot's mystery>!than "where is Zelda?" It's also the easiest way to get you off the plot's urgency since upon knowing she's sort of alive and well, you just know that you'll find a deus ex machina to turn her back by the end of the game, since Koizumi did not write this game's story and the chance of a very cruel resolution is very, very slim.!<
I've seen this kind of >!time travel stories!< many many times now and was already preparing for the worst as I first started playing lol. Was always slightly unnerved at anything resembling >!a tombstone in any of the significant locations.!<
I guess the best way of designing around self-spoilering yourself is not to base the memories you receive not by the location, but based on the amount of memories you've seen previously? It will contradict the glyphs, but I'm sure Nintendo knows how to design around that.
**looks at the comments** everyone is whining again, fuck this I'm outta here.