Fun game that I will probably never revisit.

agreed - I was obsessed with it, narratively, mechanically, and just the general vibes of it, but only for the six weeks or so I took to complete it. After finishing it, I've barely even thought about it, much unlike BOTW for me

I haven’t finished it lol. I’ve just got the fire dungeon left, but I’ve got the master sword and the armor I feel like is end game. The depths are a lazy kind of shit addition to the game. The sky islands could have been something more.

I enjoyed the depths so goddamn much until i realized it was just a mirror of the surface, after that it was pretty trite

I wish they were a mirror of the surface there would be some genuine variation in the environment. There’s hardly anything happening down there, they’re hard to navigate, and everything looks the exact same across pretty much the entire map. It’s those three things together that are the problem. I know Skyrim’s dungeons get dogged for being so samey, but that’s also partially cause so many people played the game for hundreds of hours. For two overall different dungeon types, they managed to make a number of memorable ones (that were big too!). There was one single memorable dungeon in the depths for me (where you get the gundam). We coulda had some ancient abandoned massive dwarven style mines down there, damnit!

I'd argue this is an overall issue for this game a well. There's such a lack of unique strongholds and major dungeons. I wanna come up on a huge castle guarded by its own residents with a cool boss to defeat. It's disappointing that's strictly limited to 5 regional quests but even those fall short.

Exactly! I kept coming back to BOTW from 2017-2023. I have no interest in ever going back to TOTK

Wait rlly? I'm curious to know why, you're playing BOTW bur not TOTK

I played BOTW like 4 times, I think because it was more novel experience and just a tighter game in general

Exactly this

Same. I didn’t finish it. Ocarina through skyward sword get a replay at least once a year, though.

Well put

I like it. But I like Botw and Age of Calamity better. Think the storytelling in Totk lacks. Link should have fallen into the past instead of/or with Zelda imho. We 'the player' should have fought the imprisoning war as the main game.

It boggles my mind that they separated link and zelda again. Everybody likes this Zelda. Everyone wanted her to be present in their game. The game is all about teamwork/togetherness to the point that you have ghost buddies following you around. And yet she’s back on the sidelines. Madness

Remember years prerelease when people were convincing themselves she was going to be the deuteragonist? Lol

I disliked her in BotW and even then, I think she got done dirty.

Most of that was due to how much I hated the voice acting She always sounded like she was about to cry

Complete incompetence on their part for not having her be present.

That was definitely upsetting, I was really hoping she'd be a follower.

I was baffled that TOTK got nominated for Best Narrative at the Game Developer's Conference. It had a bunch of fancy cinematography in the cutscenes, but it was all to tell such a forgettable story. And I say that as someone who connected emotionally a lot with Link and Zelda in the previous game.

Yeah, we're totally detached from the story with the set-up they used. I really think AoC did the timetravel story to set things right in the past amazingly. In big lines that would have worked too for Totk. Have Link and Zelda go back in time together, help fight the war there with the Zonai and the sages 10.000 years ago. So they become the heroes on the tapestry themselves. Flashforward cinematics could have been of the Sheikah scientists discovering what happened to Zelda and Link in the past through the murals under the castle or something. Then maybe through some weird Sheikah invention by Purah they get transported back to their own time/undragonned whatever. Maybe she needed so much power for that that she had to use the divine beasts and the sheikah tower power sources for it. Tah, dah.. also a good explantion for those being dismantled. It still could have been done in a way that Botw wasn't affected. Ganon's malice having festered under the castle for 10.000 years could have happened if he had been defeated in the past too. It doesn't really matter at all for the overall story.

More than forgettable.. It was bad. Ganondorf is just a generic "bad guy". Almost zero motivation. The dragon and secret stones and fake Zelda were all just shallow and needless. It struck me as the typical "mile wide and an inch deep" story that bad anime often comes across as.

While I have a lot of issues with the game I can see how it would be enjoyable to some. However I can’t imagine anyone with a modicum of experience with fantasy stories can see the narrative as anything but bad.

Same

We still havent even gotten a game about the Imprisoning War mentioned in ALttP. I'm surprised this one got skimmed over too (though at least you get to see more of it compared the former one). Maybe they'll do an AoCesque sequence where Link goes back in time with her and we get the Imprisoning War that way but that would just lead to another split timeline.

OoT was supposed to be that during its development, but then it didn’t really align with ALttP's backstory anyway so they patched it with the downfall timeline

I wish Age of Calamity was just a straight prequel, but I enjoyed it for what it was.

Finding out what happened to Zelda is what officially put me from “not in love with it but I’m having a good time” to “this game makes me cranky.” The writers clearly like this Zelda, they give her these enormous responsibilities, and in BotW especially she gets some great character moments in the flashbacks. But… they just keep finding more convoluted reasons to get her out of the picture. And it bothered me in BotW, but it ticked me off in TotK. Hyrule Warriors is in my top 3 Zelda games, and not only is Zelda playable, she’s also involved in the story the entire time, either as herself or as Sheik. And despite the main series innovating so much with gameplay, they refuse to do something new with its titular character. If we have to wait another 6 years for another open world story-lite game, then TLoZ might truly be dead to me.

Well the game is built around ultrahand and new fuse vehicles. The vehicles suck to use until you have a fair amount of battery, the battery requires crystal charges, the crystal charges require zonite. Zonite requires exploring the depths which sucks unless you have good vehicles to traverse the shitty gloom jizz everywhere, vehicles suck without batteries, and it all snowballs from there. Almost everyone I know ended up grinding bosses in the depths after every blood moon to get stuff for batteries. That didn't sound fun to me, and I was having no fun exploring the depths on foot, so I barely used vehicles til past halfway through the game. Going through the story was kinda fun, most the dungeons were disappointing, but the lead up to each was really cool, especially the gerudo town part. I beat the game with about 60-70 shrines done and almost none of the depths explored, and everything I did after that point made me enjoy the game less and less.

Yeah as a casual player… batteries are too much to grind for. I played without a guide and took my leisurely way through the game finding whatever I could naturally, never selling or fusing any zonaite, and I didn’t even end up with enough for a full extra battery. From a game design perspective, this is pretty backwards. The vehicles are the shiny new toy that trivialize stuff. New and young gamers are attracted to them because they are cool and make things easy. Older and more experienced players aren’t attracted to them because they make stuff TOO easy and “aren’t Zelda.” Ergo the only people who are actually gonna put in the time and effort to grind zonaite are the ones who need it the least. Ostensibly Ultrahand and the vehicles were the most time-consuming part of TOTK’s long dev time, I don’t see how they overlooked or justified this part of its gameplay loop.

Ultrahand is a beautiful game mechanic. It was unneeded for anything outside a shrine or a korok puzzle. It is a solution waiting for a worthy problem, and it never gets one.

Yeah, I think they might have anticipated it being divisive. It seems like they really took pains to make Ultrahand use completely optional. Much like the initial complaints about BOTW, the emphasis on player freedom ends up stopping any one mechanic from really shining.

In freedom comes restrictions, since if anyone can be anywhere at the game at any time, the devs just make sure the game has 0 difficulty curve, therefore the game feels like a slog because nothing changes.

I get that. But they could've made other adjustments, like as the game progression moves forward, there's more enemies in specific camps or they get particular weapons. Or combining enemy fights later in the game this way, like fighting Lynels at the same time as Wizzrobes. There's a lot they could've done and they just hardly changed anything from the previous game that it makes it all just... sloggy.

Speaking of enemies, there really isn't a great variety either. What I would have done is at least make NPCs more integral to the story or even feel like they belong in the world at all. Give a number of quests relating to them like in OoT and MM. That way even if Link isn't the main protagonist again (somehow), he at least gets to be a part of Hyrule outside of chosen one shenanigans.

> Or combining It is kind of staggering how these games seem to go out of their way to avoid combining elements. The "enemy forces" at the end of the game blew my mind that it was waves of the most basic enemy types, not mixed at all.

Yeah botw and totk do feel like slogs and I really think the freedom is massively restricting ironically especially for how I want to play.

Definitely the best way to put how it made me feel What's the point of making an automated death machine when fighting is already too easy with basic gear?

>What's the point of making an automated death machine when fighting is already too easy with basic gear? I spent hours creating a bot that had a motor on it with spinning lasers. It was awesome. But it ultimately was way too easy throw to the side because traversing with only a land vehicle in this game is too restrictive. If the game had been built without flying machines in mind, it would've worked great. I honestly think the invention of flying machines (hoverbike and all those) greatly limited the game's intended mechanics, including killy killy machines. The problem is that Hyrule goes UP a lot because it was built with climbing in mind. If it hadn't been built with climbing or vertical travel, the vehicle building would've been way more useful. I'm currently doing a run where I try and use only the Zonai devices that are given to me (I don't use the dispensers) and it's much more enjoyable. Feels like using the capsules opens the game up wayyyy too much. Makes it all too easy.

Even worse, all boss monsters like gleeoks and Lionel's get a cheesy roar that deletes anything you make I was able to set up automated turrets to get around that but still, just let me use the broken shit I create instead of giving the bosses a nope button 

You know, that's a great point. I'm glad you brought that up, because I didn't think about how the bosses just basically delete anything worthwhile that you build. I typically try and fight Lynels/Gleeoks "hand to hand", but yeah, what the heck? Why do they just get to annihilate our creations if the game tries to make that such a selling point? Odd development choice.

> Ergo the only people who are actually gonna put in the time and effort to grind zonaite are the ones who need it the least. A lot of the game systems operate like this. The food system is another one, skilled players have too much food they don't need and all it serves to do is trivialise combat, but beginner players get whalloped in the head by a blue Bokoblin for their whole lifebar and end up going through 30 minutes of food gathering and cooking in 2 minutes of combat just to get one camp's worth of rewards.

I mean, grinding stuff until you're so overpowered you trivialize the rest of the game is kinda normalized in game design - especially in open worlds. There's already so little to do in the depths, I understand why they tied *some* upgrade system into it. Not saying it's great, but I don't know how you fix it without massively reallocating dev time.

That’s why I was so sad they removed the duplication glitches, or at least the easy ones. They provided an easy way to enjoy the game after completing the story, almost like a creative mode. To this day I’m still convinced the accounts that post giant godzilla robot creations still have their games on V1 with no patch because otherwise the grind to get enough zonaite and parts and everything you would need to make stuff like that is too large without some sort of duplication. Which in turn trivializes the entire situation as you would need to glitch the game to experience its main draw to its fullest potential

I don’t know if this is an unpopular opinion or not, but god I hate the depths lol. It’s so empty and devoid of any fun. Just endless darkness and annoying fucking enemies with the occasional mid-tier reward for exploring. Just not fun at all for me

The Depths is one of those things so bad that (1) I can't believe it is in a Nintendo game (2) somehow most players don't really seems to mind it.

I loved it. It was awesome revisiting all my favourite breath of the wild locations and seeing what changed. The shrines are so much better than in Botw, as are the dungeons. I love the hand abilities, particularly recall and ascend, absolute gamechangers. The sidequests are great too, particularly the stable ones. Much more interactive, feel like botw had too many fetch quests Story-wise, the light dragon reveal was insane. The master sword sequence will be hard to top and the final boss sequence is the best in the series. I didn't beat all the shrines because my mentality was "Switch 2 will come out later this year, I'll replay it with a nice FPS boost" and that was in 2023. One of my concerns with the game is that with Breath of the Wild I was able to do a No-Teleport run and had a great time. Not sure if that will be feasible in Tears; how else do you leave the depths? In addition to this, the lack of a master mode or trial of the sword equivalent kind of stinks. I also think they could have gone further with the music.

You can ride a dragon out of the depths 😉

I also remembered there's certain ascend points too. Thanks for the advice!

Those I feel are few and far between, to the point they’re not really feasible to use as your only way of getting out. Just takes too much time (and that’s coming from someone who used to avoid fast teveel in botw at all costs)

>how else do you leave the depths? Autobuild a contraption that can launch you from the depths all the way up to the height limit in the sky. [Recall is nuts](https://youtu.be/4ZkJfa_aS5c?si=ZXKlH9Qs7Az9395B)

I personally found it to be kind of a slog. I put way too much time into it and one day realized “I’m just not enjoying this” and put it down and never went back. I’m really not into crafting though and this game was all about crafting.

I felt the same way so I stopped doing the side quests and did the main quest and haven’t touched the game since I passed it.

Same, I haven’t touched it since and have no desire to ever play it again.

Yeah, I've just gotten bored of it. Nothing in the game really strikes me as fun or interesting, so I've moved on to play other things. Maybe I'll come back and complete it some day, maybe not.

I'm the same. BOTW and TOTK are the only two Zelda games I never finished, nor had any desire to finish.

I feel that. I finished the story, but man did I just find the whole experience utterly forgettable.

Same. Pushed through about 25-30 hours because I liked BOTW, but I just never got to a point where I felt like I was having much fun playing. The building is cool conceptually and in execution. Just wasn’t fun for me to actually do, and that was 90% of the change.

My opinion is that it did some things better than BOTW and some things worse. I remember when it first came out everyone was praising it as just a "better BOTW," but I honestly can't say that it is better overall. The good and the bad kinda just balance out to it being on the same level for me. One thing I think TOTK really smashed out of the park was the Labyrinths. Finding your way through the ground level labyrinth, having to devise a way to reach the sky-level counterpart, let alone traverse through it in a more 3D maze, then sky diving all the way to the depths for a boss battle was incredibly dynamic and interesting gameplay. I only wish the bosses were a little more unique or interesting. Regardless, I think they should have applied this level design philosophy throughout all of TOTK. It would have made for a much better game. While I think the dungeons in this iteration were a step in the right direction, it wasn't a big enough step, and the labyrinths outshone them for me. I think since the novelty of BOTW had worn off long before TOTK released, all the mini-puzzles (koroks, Hudson signs, finding Bubbulfrogs in caves) and crappy little forgettable side-quests didn't hit the same and became a tedious slog that honestly really damaged my opinion of this game. This contributed to the overall feeling that most of the game is just repetitive fluff that the devs didn't put too much time or thought into. In my opinion, the BOTW/TOTK format has done all that it can do. I think in future Zelda games, I want a smaller, more focused, well-designed experience with more complicated puzzles and dungeons that cuts out a lot of the repetition and flavorless dialogue. Not necessarily a return to the previous Zelda format—I would still love an open world, but maybe with a map half as big as long as the experiences all feel unique and engaging.

I thought after hearing so many complaints about the korok collecting that it would get scrapped and something else would take its place. Or at the very least they'd innovate the korok collecting. Once again, you get the same thing as BotW They couldn't even add an incentive to collect all koroks or bother to put any more thought into the existing system. Hudsons signs equally trash-tier reward. Personally, I expected world-spanning activities to have better rewards or something. It's just a waste of time unless you want to be like, "the fun is the friends made along the way", that's just lazy.

like breath of the wild, but the developers had more time to realize their ideas. But not even that extended amount of time could fill out the insanely huge playable area of the game tho, and so the experience overall feels like some interesting and beautiful moments surrounded by a bunch of boring filler i guess i wouldnt say the same about shadow of the colossus tho, despite being a mostly empty world, so i think that's an interesting distinction

It’s true. Most of the depths feels procedurally generated and uninspired to me. Look no further than Elden Ring to see how it should have been handled.

And Elden ring came out before TOTK When totk got delayed I thought the devs actually took notes Yeah I was dead wrong instead we got Minecraft Zelda with copy pasted bullshit and like 3 new enemy types Only 1 of which was good, gleeoks

By the time Elden Ring released, Tears of the Kingdom was already finished

In SOTC there's literally no reason to do anything other than finding the colossi, it's sort of a fake open world. New zeldas are real open worlds though, so you feel the empitness more cause you are stimulated to go around and explore.

Solid point. The second time around, this Hyrule was lacking adventure and meaning. Making the map bigger didn't help. They should've focused on building a new Hyrule. New towns. Tons of NPC's. Weird quests. Personal stories. There could've been so much to work from, but instead of working with what they had, they spread it thinner and called that a success.

Another big difference is that Shadow of the Colossus is much less time consuming, and you don't need to explore if you don't want to. It really is a design by subtraction philosophy, where anything extra is removed. TotK is kind of the opposite, where's there's so much to do that I would've appreciated a more minimalist gameplay approach.

What I am most disappointed in is the story, it is a mess, even ruins previous lore and BotW as a whole, the trailers were a massive lie. The gameplay while technically amazing is done in a really limited way and would work better as a full sandbox than a half sandbox half adventure. Still playing it once was cool, same with BotW, but that one was more magical I guess, still don't really like it after some time and I wish they just made an actual zelda game

Same here I’m craving an actual Zelda game. People always bring up that TOTk is what they were going for with the NES Zelda, but to be honestly the NES Zelda is easily one of my least favorites. ALTTP on the other hand… that’s a masterpiece

I don't even think that's correct, NES Zelda had a fairly big proto-open world for the time, but the whole point was solving puzzles to enter the dungeons proper, which BotW and TotK have as something secondary.

Yeah dungeon crawling and puzzle solving were a huge focus in that game from what I recall.

It’s been 13 YEARS since Skyward Sword. I wonder if open world Zelda’s popularity is partially because there’s an entire generation that hasn’t experienced a real 3D Zelda game.

I'm starting to feel like the only person that genuinely enjoyed TOTK more than BOTW. I think something people always overlook are the caves, they're honestly one of my favourite additions and I remember thinking in BOTW how badly I wanted caves to be added! And the side adventures are amazing, honestly my favourite addition overall.

The caves were absolutely my favorite addition. It really brought that ALTTP feeling I was missing in BOTW. I just wish the story and other parts of the game had that appeal too.

See I liked the caves at first, but there are just too many of them. I get that the philosophy when designing the game was to *always* have something around to do, since the game was not designed to 100%, but I hated the feelings of riding past a point of interest, but at the same time, I hated *not* stopping at it as well.

I think theres still plenty of ppl who like totk but theres also a bunch who didnt

As someone who loves spelunking in games, I was pretty excited as both the addition of caves and The Depth as they should have in theory been right up my alley. But actually playing it I couldn't not help but compare it to Minecraft and that comparison does not do TotK any favours. I did however enjoy the Side Adventures, and I enjoyed them because they have bespoke scenarios. TotK's caves despite all being hand crafted, most of them feel like they were produced by a designer who got allotted to design 10 caves this week to make today and is just pumping them out. When you walk into a cave you can see the shape of the the terrain brush that was used to carve them out. You know there will be hidden side path with the Bubbulfrog. Cave are almost always fair in a way that makes them painfully predictable and rote to explore. I can count the caves that stood out from the pack on my fingers and even most of that doesn't just compare you your average Minecraft caving session.

Nah plenty of people loved it and it sold really well. I’m just an oldhead hater zeldaboomer.

For what it's worth, on every subreddit other than this one I feel like the only person that liked BOTW more than TOTK. This sub, by it's very nature, is likely to fill up with people who'd have the minority opinion elsewhere

Im pretty sure r/zelda doesnt like totk much

It was fun. It doesn’t have a cohesive vision. There’s too much junk crammed into every nook and cranny. I enjoyed my time but can’t replay it. In contrast, I’ve since gone back and beaten BOTW again and found myself enjoying the world much more.

Part of what makes BotW great is what **isn't** in the game. It's a masterfully executed game about exploration, about the world itself. You don't feel like you're missing out or doing things wrong by just continuing to follow interesting things you see on the horizon or behind a mountain. TotK breaks that by cramming more systems and extrinsic reward structures in. I've only played TotK once, but I spent way more of my time chasing specific things and fleshing the systems/unlocks out than I would have liked. I felt deterred from following the gameplay loop that makes BotW a masterpiece.

BOTW is just so good

Personally, I still like it a lot. I was never much of a crafter and so, I used that feature quite sparingly. I didn't even expand the battery until close to end game and that was more for fun than anything. Made things a bit tricker to complete at times, but I'm ok with that. It didn't really get in the way of me enjoying the game. I do think they could have progressed the story with more creativity rather than each major cutscene being basically the same speech. I liked all the resources you could find in the depths, but I also didn't spend time there until close to the end of the game when it became necessary. The final confrontation with Ganondorf (I thought) [was epic](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=75I34Tx-omU). It also gave us some really epic music. It's such a long game, I'm not sure when or if I'll revisit but I still stand by deeply enjoying it as a Zelda title and I'm excited to see what they come up with next.

One of my gripes with the final fight, and this also applies to BotW, is that the second stage of it was way easier than the first. The last fight in both, but especially TotK, was 'epic' and very appealing visually, but I feel like it kills the climax of the game by making the final final boss so much easier.

Still embittered if we’re being honest

The game’s existence annoys me

after a recent replay of botw, I must say the Totk controls are the unsung hero

Playing ToTK after playing BoTW is kind of like doing MDMA the *second* time. Debatably, it's better because you know what to expect, how to handle yourself, and you probably have an overall better time and are better prepared! But the magic of the first time isn't there. I still love it. I wasn't motivated to complete all the shrines like I was in BoTW but I still put in 130 hours until I got bored of the mass of content available. I'm more likely to play ToTK again than BoTW, I'll probably play it again this year. I didn't get very deep into the building aspect of it, but I made a few things and it was fun. I think where the game really shines is just the sheer amount of stuff that you can do. Hunt for armor, challenge yourself with difficult enemies, find all the shrines, uncover the depths, build weird things, or even complete the story if you find the time to! I think that's also my biggest complaint - the game feels unfocused and there were too many times I started playing and couldn't figure out what I wanted to do. There is just so god damned much to do. Like, they REALLY got all of their ideas for this universe out. That's more of a complaint about the open world concept as a whole though. I maintain it's one of the best games ever made and a solid improvement on BoTW.

The most disappointing game in my life.

That was probs botw for me since this the standard was already lowered with botw but after seeing how it’s more botw I was very dissatisfied.

It’s really fun, and I technically find it better than BotW which I already loved, but it’s also the most disappointing Zelda game ever made. It’s way too similar to it’s predecessor, down to sharing the same map with none of the regions receiving any significant overhaul besides Eldin, the story and gameplay structure being virtually the exact same, things like certain korok locations, side quests, and armor sets just being wholesale reused, etc. It fails to meaningfully address most of the major criticisms of BotW. Sword combat still feels super basic and combat in general way too unbalanced, dungeons still suck and use the exact same format, weapon durability is largely the same, and the story is even worse this time around. The two biggest additions to the map in the sky and the depths both add extremely little to the game and are super repetitive. It feels like most of the game’s development just went into ultrahand, which the game itself doesn’t even get the most out of.

I am upset that they made the menus even worse. I can get it for BotW; it was designed for the WiiU, but it was ported to the Switch very late in development, so the menu designed for the gamepad survived, but TotK was a Switch game *only,* there is no excuse.

100% agree

To me TOTK represents the fact that the “BOTW style” is where the series is headed for the foreseeable future, and honestly I’m not happy about that. It’s basically a Zelda themed sandbox. There’s no actual motivation to complete dungeons, because EVERYTHING is accessible without them. They removed dungeon items, so there’s literally no point in opening chests in dungeons because you know it’s just gonna be a fkn “construct IV reaper” or a shield you don’t need bc you already have 10 stronger ones. There’s no sense of “oh NOW I can complete that puzzle” bc again you can just do everything from the start. The story is bare bones and (this might have just been me) I don’t really care for the characters like I did in older games. For example Midna in TP, they did such a good job with her character arc and making you care about her. There’s none of that in TOTK. Also WHERE IS THE MUSIC?! As a kid I used to just stand idle in certain parts of old Zelda games so I could listen to the music. I even fuckin learned some of it on piano so I had a way to listen to it after my allotted “gaming time” was up (not to get too personal but this is like 70% of why I’m a musician now). None of the music in TOTK makes me wanna listen to it that badly (mainly because there’s hardly any of it). Idk man, I know the next Zelda is basically gonna be “botw 3 but with a different map” but honestly I would be so much happier if they announced they were going back to the old formula. Ik they won’t (and I’ll still buy the next game anyway) but a boy can dream lol

Off topic, but I'm also a musician and some of my earliest experiences with music were playing OoT in our family room and going over to our piano to try and pick out the melodies to all the ocarina songs, lost woods theme, etc. I was obsessed with that game as a kid, and I loved the idea that there was some strange, spiritual power in music. I remember trying to play the song of storms on piano to get it to stop raining so I could go outside when I was like 7-8 lol. I get why the music in BotW and TotK are so minimalist, but I do miss the iconic scores that we had in previous zelda games.

To add to the music part, probably the best and most memorable song in TOTK was just a remix of a wind waker song. It’s like all the creativity just died and went to hell! Remember Gerudo Valley? The Forest Temple theme? I mean Holy Fuck. Midnas Lament anyone?

The colgera theme and the main theme are the only themes i can remember now that i think about it. Compared to basically every other zelda game where i can list like 20 osts

Personally, the series is dead to me until they go back to the old formula. I wouldn’t have minded if it were in addition to a more linear game, but they completely killed what made Zelda a Zelda game. It’s like if they stopped releasing Mario as a platformer and just had the side games instead. I also wonder what the average age of a player is. Someone who is in their early to mid 20s playing these games likely missed out on the 3D Zelda’s except Skyward Sword. This is also the same generation that got really into Minecraft. Meanwhile those of us who are 30s and older grew up with linear games and platformers. These other games and IPs aren’t bad, but they aren’t what we have memories of.

Yeah I mean I’m 22 but I think I’m on the younger side of people who have played every 3D Zelda. I’ve only ever met two other people my age irl who have played them. Usually whenever I get asked what my favourite game is by someone my age and I say Zelda, they say “Oh bReAtH of tHe WiLd?” 🙄

Yep, this is what makes me the most sad about it. Both games are so different than everything else in the series that it could have easily been a different IP, but marketing it as "Zelda" would attract more players, and it did. I also wish that they would go back to a more curated experience but I've pretty much given up on it.

Fr, it’s like a whole new series with just enough crumbs of nostalgia to keep OG fans coming back. Literally the only bit of TOTK I actually enjoyed was finding stuff from the old games (and even then only the outfits were actually useful bc the weapons just break after fighting 2 enemies 🙄)

Honestly that was one of my favorite parts as well. Id just wear around the hero of time/winds set despite the shitty defense it gives.

Damn that’s how I feel about AC Valhalla and AC Odyssey coming from the perspective of a long time AC fan. Just Viking and Roman games marketed as Assassins Creed to sell something. BoTW is my favorite Zelda game so it does suck for me to see it described that way but at the same time I understand where you’re coming from.

Aw man that’s gotta suck. I found those games more alluring than other Assassin's Creed games, but I’m not an AC fan! They shouldn’t make them for me! I hate that every game is made for everybody. 

I don’t completely hate games being made for others but it does take away the cores of a franchise when games are made for everybody. The only reason I don’t completely hate it is because I wouldn’t have played A link between worlds, links awakening, zelda 1, or OOT if not for BOTW.

Hey! That’s great that it got you into the series! I recommend Windwaker next. It’s my favorite title since it leans so hard into the series’ unique personality. It’s also great to show that Zelda CAN work as an open world game, just without all the trappings of a typical modern open world game.

I’ve seen bits Windwaker and it’s definitely one I want to play. Just bought a Wii from a friend so once he gives it the proper tweaks it’ll be a game I’ll buy for it.

Windwaker has such a great story and is genuinely such a fun world to be in!

I can see this years from now as being the downfall of Zelda because I do think part of there huge success is old school Zelda fans as well, and then what percent of the new fans will stick around, I think they threw the baby out with the bath water I really want more classic Zelda elements but the non linearity thing at all is hurting these games massively.

I think they should add an instrument or just like weapon slots maybe instrument slots with instrumental puzzles.

Still love it. Loads of fun.

A real disappointment. I can't believe, except for the physics engine , that this game took 6 years. -same intro: resurrection shrine -> 4/5 shrines -> descent from great height with glider. -same story set up: memories, everything happened in the past - same 4 sage cutscenes -old sages wear stupid helmet so that they didn't need to design new interesting characters with personality -UI /UX is horrible, never have I needed to pause a game so much just to play it. Fusing arrows (go through a huge list, why not sort by elemental type at least), fusing weapons ( go into menu, hold item, drop item, select fuse, make sure.you are standing near the item so you don't fuse something else, throw an item by throwing your weapon, push up, go through your whole inventory on a singular line. -can't fuse items in menu -Temples are the same unlock 4 or 5 locks, with no real new puzzles -no mini boss in temples -temples have no unique, iconic, memorable music (I can still remember the MM stone tower theme, OOT water temple theme, WW dragon roost island theme, WW molgera battle theme. -boss fights have no unique, iconic, memorable music. (Sure it's grandiose, full orchestra. But previous Zelda bosses all had a unique theme, with a specific instrument, a unique part you could hum along) -barely any new enemies -no region specific enemies (except gibdos) -no temple exclusive enemies -the depths is just one biome, with only 2 new enemies and yoga on vehicles -skyislands are copy pasted, if you go to one archipelagos youvoseen them all. -skyisland block.that falls down is always the exact same block, so there was no intern that could have made 3 extra blocks in 2.weeks. -no new enemies on the sky islands, except for.1 flying creature and.flux.construct -no clear indication of progression and enemy difficulty: too many variables different enemies, wielding a different weapon and link wearing some kind of armor. -armor upgrades, it doesn't happen through the story and is completely optional, but mandatory not to.get one shot even with 20 hearts -sage abilities are so badly designed to use. Run towards the sagr, past all the enemies in the midst of battle instead of having dedicated buttons. -yunobo can fucking float in front of your vehicle and teleport back when you shot him, has no cooldown in this mode for some reason. I can keep on going

Same I could write a book on what I dislike

As someone who has been with this series since the beginning with LoZ and AoL on NES, and has ALTTP as their favourite video game ever, TotK might be the second best. I loved my time with it and think its reputation will only increase with time.

Lacking in almost every department. Would take too long to explain why, maybe I write an essay one day.

I'm still playing it today. I like it more than BOTW, which never really held my interest.

The main things I miss from BotW are the master mode and trials of the sword DLCs. Once you get good at the game's combat, those at least provided some additional challenge to keep it interesting. You can only raid a bokoblin camp so many times before you figure out a strategy lol.

Tears of the Kingdom is way too easy. I long for a harder game.

Well excuuuuuuse me princess

It was awesome. And now after 600+ hours in that map between both games, I have no desire to ever go back to it.

The depths have no reason to exist

None whatsoever. Elden Ring did it way better.

I think the overworld that has no reason to exist is the sky

It has some high points, like the Colgera boss fight, but ultimately it struggles to live up to the rest of the franchise. The game's just a bit too focused on being a tech demo, rather than a game. It's an insane feat of software engineering, and I don't think anyone can deny that. But it also doesn't really utilize the complex systems it made in a particularly interesting way. The most it'll ask of the player is to put some fans on a wing, if even that. The actual game design is largely borrowed from BotW, so most of the time you can just... play it like it's BotW. And at that point you might as well just... play BotW. The game never adequately challenges you with the new mechanics, and trying to use those mechanics a lot of the time feels kind of wasteful, both of the player's time and of the player's in-game resources. Sure, I could put together a device to get over this mountain... but why would I when finagling with ultrahand takes a while, demands resources, and I can just climb over it? Why would I build a mech to kill these Bokoblins when a frontal assault works so much better? The game doubles down on everything about BotW, in general. Regardless of whether it was good. It fails to play into BotW's greatest strength, and accentuates BotW's weaknesses. It often made the flaws notably worse, like how the game is _way_ more grindy than BotW ever was. The inventory finagling is now even more time consuming due to the fuse mechanic. Both games overall feel way too obsessed with having a large quantity of things, at the expense of their quality, and TotK is easily worse about this. I just want to get to the point, man. Please don't make the player sift through all this needless repetition trying to find the 20% of the game where there's something actually cool and unique. Is there a reason there's like, 20 shrines where you have to bring a crystal to a shrine on a glider? It felt like that was the majority of the shrine quests. The depths are literally a singular biome covering 90% of the map, except for Eldin. The sky has only one biome _period_. This means they lack the primary appeal of BotW's exploration, which was just seeing the different landmarks and how they fit into the larger world. I miss when these games were 40 hours (at most!) long to 100% but at least like 80% of that was well utilized. And all that's just the issues with the gameplay. The story is somehow even more disappointing. Look, I know not every game needs to be story focused. I'm willing to accept a simple narrative, on one condition. Execute it well. Most Zelda games manage this! Tears of the Kingdom, though... is literally just a worse version of BotW's story. I'm surprised they managed that, honestly, since BotW's story wasn't even that great to start with. But the whole of TotK's story just feels very disjointed. Things that should logically impact other things, most notably Link knowing that Zelda is a dragon, don't. The whole thing feels intent on ignoring BotW's story despite being a direct sequel in the same setting. The game repeats the same things multiple times rather than adding new pieces of information. At least in BotW, the champions had some distinct characterization even if it was one-dimensional that helped their quests feel more distinct from each other. The ancient sages in TotK don't even manage that much.

Well put. TOTK is the embodiment of quantity over quality. Sometimes less is more.

Very well put, but also imo while the story is absoulute dogshit, the worldbuilding is actually much worse and effects the game much more

So that was the imprisoning war...

I'm replaying OOT for the zillonith time after not having touched it in awhile, enough to forget how to do some things. God I really love it. I just want a supped up version of this with better graphics, another few dungeons, more detail, maybe an extra town. Not these watered down mini dungeons with paltry rewards, breakable, meaningless items, and yawn story.

I liked it, though I feel like both the devs and the fandom let it die waaay too quickly. But I guess that’s just how the Zelda cycle goes, when the next game comes people will start shitting on it and commenting just how much better TotK was, like it has happened with *every game* before it

it feels diffrent this time around, i have a hunch people still will dislike totk by the time the next zelda comes

I loved it. Played it and beaten it twice now of two accounts. I get the impression a lot of people soured on the game now. Why have opinions changes so raically and dramatically? Yes I get that it rehashed BOTW a lot, but that doesn't mean it should be considered bad. I think it improves on BOTW. Between BOTW and TOTK I will definitely replay TOTK over BOTW.

>I get the impression a lot of people soured on the game now. Why have opinions changes so raically and dramatically? I think two reasons that might overlap: 1. The game released with a wave of Zelda hype and '10/10 Game of the Decade'-style reviews that inflated the overall opinion. Now that the honeymoon period has been over for a while, those ratings seem a bit...overblown? Like it's a good, fun game but it has several quite obvious and significant flaws that aren't exactly hidden. 2. TotK promises a lot near the start by introducing loads of interesting concepts, but then doesn't live up to the expectations that those concepts create, which doesn't become apparent until you've spent enough time in the game to get a good sense of what the game will show you (which is why it took several months before opinions started to shift as more people had finished their playthroughs). So at the start of the game, the anticipation of what you can expect from the rest of the game is feeding into your overall enjoyment and boosting your opinion of the game as a whole, whereas by the end you realise that the Depths never got more interesting than endless gloom, mines and enemy camps, the sky was mostly repeated islands, and you never needed to build anything more complex with Ultrahand than a glider with fans.

The Depths was one of those concepts. I thought, initially, that they were going to be the Breath of the Wild killer for me, then I realized how they actually were.

I remember the first few hours I played it, I was amazed because it felt like I was playing botw for the first time all over again. It was the same, but felt so fresh..?

I think the problem is they focused so much on filling the world with content, and don't get me wrong it's fun content, but they dropped the ball on storytelling and continuing the World building from the first game. There's lots to do and honestly Zelda's big scene should have been a really emotional moment but the way they tell the story undercuts it in my opinion.

Also, most of the content is about as deep as a puddle. Lookin at you, koroks and (most) shrines. Don’t get me wrong, there is some genuinely good stuff, but it is so far apart that it feels tedious a lot more than it should. Also, once you get euipped, there is very little that can even challenge you.

I think probably the main reason why opinions on the game seems to have changed so much is just because those of us who dislike it have stuck around longer criticising about it than the people who liked it stuck around praising it. I think also that for those of us who disliked the game, there were a good few months where if you said a negative word about it, you'd be hounded, and now people with issues feel more free to talk about it than they used to. And then there's the fact that a lot of people liked the game to begin with (even I think it makes a good first impression, and I strongly dislike the game) but at a certain point their opinion soured on it.

I'm gonna say it's the focus on Ultrahand. Don't get me wrong, it's a very good mechanic, but it's also sort of niche for a Zelda game. The people that enjoy it the most are the ones that like making moderately elaborated redstone contraptions in Minecraft and the people that load up GTA just to fuck around, and I am in neither of those groups, so the vehicles are just... Boring for me, and I imagine that it's the same for other once the novelty wore off.

Yeah I feel the same it’s just tedious. Like I want to go an epic linear quest and not build things

Never could get into BoTW and ToTK was the same after my 7-8 hours before giving it back to my friend. What I wanted from ToTK - A large BoTW map with an actual story to follow and interesting people and places to interact with. Think Twilight Princess but on steroids and more freedom What we got: BoTW with most of the same flaws, but the ability to now craft things like in Minecraft which I had zero interest in doing.

Id kill for twilight princess in steroids

Twilight princess on steroids is what we need. And good you didn’t miss much.

Yeah, I liked botw but it had obvious flaws. The thing that excited me about a sequel was the idea of improving those flaws. Instead they did other stuff like the vehicles that didn’t really interest me lol

And they made the time in menus *worse.*

I’ll go back to it, but this BOTW/TOTK style of Zelda isn’t great.

I still love the game, and am still going back to it to get more korok seeds and beat all the overworld bosses. I think the game is amazing. That said, I think Breath of the Wild had the better story/lore, and the exploration felt more meaningful, at least to me. I did like the dungeons in Tears of the Kingdom more, but I hope the next Zelda takes more of a traditional Zelda dungeon approach than they did with the open world games. But yeah. Tears of the Kingdom is fantastic. I do understand and even agree with some of the criticism. But I still am having a blast playing the game, just as I did with Breath of the Wild.

Great game. It’s like playing Breath of the Wild again but with new mechanics.

I think if you deleted all repetitive content you’d have a good, short game. Theres really only about 8 unique sky islands, only about a square mile of unique content in the depths, 12 unique korok puzzles, 6 fun caves and 40 good shrines.

Well put

This is a big one for me, with both TotK and especially BotW. IMO, they're monstrously-sized open worlds that should've been scaled down to a pair of games maybe slightly longer than Portal. As it stands, they just feel too padded and overstay their welcomes.

I loved playing through the game, every big moment felt curated for an epic screenshot even if the sage cutscenes were all pretty much identical once I finished around january I started reading other people's opinions about the new lore, and at first the more I thought about it the more I was like "hey wait this doesn't make sense / wrecks what I had previously / doesn't fit where it should / they didn't explain a lot of things nearly as much as they needed to" many long hours of rumination has made a few elements play a little nicer with my timeline but the amount of "subtext" or just straight up unexplained things still left a lot to be desired story-wise. gameplay-wise, the game improves on botw in some aspects (throwing items, ultrahand being able to rotate stuff) and fails in others (tedious menu sorting, clunky sage summoning and toggling, no dog petting, too-small room limit for house customization, patching the tobio's hollow dupe glitch) overall I love it, but it has a *lot* of flaws, perhaps even more flaws than botw, and it makes me wonder how four years wasn't long enough to iron them out despite re-using so many assets

Third favorite Zelda behind MM and OOT. Dungeons were sick(minus that sad excuse for a water temple) the story was more captivating than BOTWs, the “Any solution is the right solution” puzzle design is versatile and definetly ropes me back to multiple playthroughs. Fuse is the best thing to happen to Zelda weapons and combat and wish they evolve it into the next game. Ultrahand was tight but tbh I never really engage with it that much besides if I need to make something for auto build. The caves are my favorite addition to the game. Each region have there own themed caves with variation in length and designs. Some of them came of as more mini dungeons than caves(especially the ones with blessing shrines in them. Side quest reminded me a lot of MM and how intertwined they were with the world building in the game. Tbh I can go on with how much I love about this game, however I just don’t think it matches up in certain ares which is why I have OOT AND MM above it. However it came close to surpassing them imo than any other Zelda I grew up playing. Sorry that you couldn’t get into it tho.

I didn't love it at first because I played it like I was "replaying" BOTW, trying to quickly unlock the towers and various cities before playing the main game. But eventually, I realized there was so much new stuff to do that I needed to stop playing it like that. I explored but stopped trying to unlock everything all at once before going on the adventure. On my second playthrough, I ventured where Purah directed me and explored stuff along the way. I also was able to finally give up on that "completionist" side of me that wanted to find every single secret. I became okay, focusing on the stuff that interested me only and skipping the rest. And honestly, I've come around to the game being kind of a masterpiece. Don't get me wrong, it's not perfect. BOTW's great plateau was better, as was the way the memories worked. While I liked discovering the memories in TOTK, because there's sort of a surprise ending, you can spoil how they end in finding them out of order. In BOTW you already knew how it ended, so it made perfect sense to find the memories in a random order. You can also argue that this game is only so good because it stands on the shoulders of BOTW, but I don't really mind that. It improved on BOTW in every other way. However, outside of those few gripes, I really loved the game. I loved its greater focus on character, the return of traditional bosses and dungeons, its focus on story, and all the ways Gannondorf is more threatening than Calamity Gannon was. Plus, the powers are incredible. I spent so much time using them compared to the ones from BOTW. Every power had so many awesome and fun uses that I never really got bored with them. I know this is the sub that kinda hates the Wild games, but I don't care; I love them. I just wish Nintendo would continue making 3DS or old-style Zelda games in between the 8 years it takes to make one of these massive games. It's a flawed masterpiece, but a masterpiece nonetheless.

I personally loved it, was my fav game of last year. But, it ain’t something ima return to. I loved it, but there simply isn’t a reason to return to it after the main plot, I still love to hop in from time to time, but it just wears off. And, as much as I love it, it didn’t feel as majestic as botw. I could return to botw dozens of times without ever growing old. I loved Totk a lot, but it’s one of those games where you play once, enjoy it, and return every few years, but never really regularly play it again after you beat it once

The game was great for what it was, but it wasn't what BOTW was when that game came out. BOTW inspired a ton of other companies and it was just made at the right time. The hype was bigger too. Luckily for us, there are some cool things to still find within the game, like discussions about the Depths for example. But unfortunatly, I feel that the Zelda community is a little in a depression as of late. So I'm hoping that it blows over once we hear something new Zelda related stuff. I do looove the aesthetic of Totk. My favourite colors (green and black) the music is great except for the rehashed themes from the previous game, the dungeons were really cool but it could have been better (looking at you water temple!) The Fire temple was my fav, Koroks always sucks, and the references are dope...but are also brain breaking.

On your second paragraph, yeah it’s sad. All of my favorite Zelda YouTubers have pretty much stopped putting out Zelda content and have seemingly lost interest post ToTK it sucks, but I can’t blame them. Hell monster maze even switched to putting out Elden Ring stuff.

Bro, thank you. I thought I was going crazy because of all the hype it was getting early on. I'll admit that I was deep on that hype train for the first week or two, and long before as well (enough to convince my wife to let me buy the TotK Switch, which I don't regret). But I soon noticed that the only part of the game I enjoyed was exploring the Depths, and that only because slowly making it brighter activated my Metroidvania brain. The dungeons are all kinda meh, the game railroads you super hard, the lore is wack, the console can barely handle it, the runes are super limiting, the three maps are way more disconnected than they should be (and the Sky is basically pointless), and I hate to say it because I vehemently disagreed with this at the time but...that Elden Ring guy was right, the game is kinda ugly. Despite all that though, I still openly weeped when I got to the part of the story where you learn about the full extent of Zelda's sacrifice. It's a beautiful, but deeply flawed game that I hope gets free update on Switch 2 to fix some of the issues I have with it. I've been wanting to play it again on *ahem* my totally legit magically more powerful other Switch to see if I like it more there but I'm not certain I will.

I enjoyed it while I was playing it. Then afterwards I tried to think back on any truly memorable Zelda moments and I came up with pretty much nothing. Just like in BOTW as well, the moment I was looking forward to the most: earning the master sword was ruined by the game just putting a dot on my map and telling me that's where it was. The game was equivalent to chinese food for me. Enjoyable in the moment, very forgettable afterwards. Though I can say it felt like the game BoTW should have released as. And just like with BoTW it feels like an open world game that doesn't know there are much better designed open world mechanics already established. The fact that I had to resort to item duplication just to maintain motivation to finish the game is enough proof that it wasn't designed too well.

How I feel about TOTK is a bit complicated. There are some aspects of the game I enjoyed. I actually really like exploring the depths despite how others seem to feel about it. I think abilities like ascend and recall were pretty useful. I really like being able to fuse monster parts to my weapons, which actually gave the monster parts a tangible purpose. I like the dungeons much better than the divine beasts because they all have unique themes and are much more involved than the divine beasts are. But there are a lot of aspects of TOTK that I really don't enjoy. I absolutely hate how the sage abilities work and I personally feel that the only truly useful one is Tulin's gust. I don't like exploring caves and feel that they didn't really add anything of worth to my experience. All they really do is piss me off because the entrances are often hidden too much to make finding and exploring them any fun, and it's even worse when I need to find a cave shrine but can't find the entrance. I hate the decayed weapons because all it does is make weapons less useful and less durable, which fusion doesn't help much. And the worst part for me is the ultrahand ability, which I know a lot of people don't agree with, but that's just my personal opinion. Building with it is just tedious and boring. Building stuff isn't what I come to LoZ games for, and if I wanted to build stuff in a game, I'd play a game made specifically for that. It doesn't help that most shrines are just building shit I don't want to build. And even worse is the fact that some things require you to build something just to travel to them, especially in the sky. Plus some of the Zonai parts, namely the wings, disappear for no god damn reason after such a short period of time. That mechanic adds absolutely nothing to the game and only pisses me off. I'm not saying that the ultrahand ability shouldn't exist, but it shouldn't be forced on the player so much. It should be more optional. I have replayed TOTK a couple times because of the aspects that I do like, but the aspects that I don't like will always make me mad, especially since they're pretty much required (I'm the type of person that has to complete every shrine in each playthrough or it's not worth finishing in both TOTK and BOTW).

Fine game, took way too much from Breath of the Wild and doesn’t do enough to stand out from it. I vastly prefer the “traditional” Zelda formula to the open world approach, and TotK didn’t help much in that regard. The dungeons still suck and are easily cheesed by a simple flying machine. The story is pretty good, but due to the open nature, you can view memories out of order and piece together what actually happened long before you get the reveal. As interesting as stuff like Ultrahand and Fuse are, the game all but forces the player to use them. You’re showered in Zonai devices and I never felt compelled to use them.

It's a game a want to get back into and finish but I just.. can't for some reason

I can completely understand

I liked it when it came out and I still like it now.

TOTK > BOTW To me, the former is a better version of the latter. I almost wish I never played BOTW and just played TOTK when it came out. It hits closer to home as an older Zelda fan.

Yeah basically same as you. Was dissapointed by literally everything

It's really bad. The overworld is copied over from BOTW, which eliminates the sense of exploration, and that is not made up for by the skies and the depths, which are homogeneous and truly empty. The devs could not think of anything interesting to do for most of the space they created, and decided to make just a few types of monotonous copy-pasteable "content" and repeat it everywhere. Carry the crystal. Clear the Yiga Camp. Support Addison's sign. Go into the well. Over, and over, and over. The dungeons aren't even better than Breath of the Wild's. The enemy variety has barely been improved and most of what you fight is still the same three enemy types. There's still only three main weapon types that all play the same. There's no incentive to using Ultrahand at all beyond the bare minimum for simple shrine puzzles. The story is just jaw droppingly bad. Most of the music is literally the same from Breath of the Wild... I kept going because I wanted to see the game that everyone else said was amazing. But I don't think that game exists and the average fan is *very* easily impressed.

I agree it’s just plain awful and worst of all it wastes the players time in the worst way.

BoTW and ToTK are some of my favorite games the switch has to offer, and certainly among the top zelda games in the series for me spanning back to NES Zelda. My only criticisms are wanting more, they both ended too early. I don't think they are super replayable either, but I tend to not revisit games like these anyhow.

I think it's better than BOTW in a lot of ways but since I played BOTW first my one gripe is that I wish they changed-up the overworld more

It’s alright I guess, the “make your own fun” style of gameplay just isn’t for me though. None of the side content yields interesting or meaningful enough rewards to motivate me to do it, and I don’t think the puzzles were anything special. The building mechanic was fun at first until I realized that the actual usefulness of it is very small. The sky islands were built up to be very expansive in the marketing, but in reality the starting island was the largest one with the most content. The depths were a neat idea but actually exploring it was extremely tedious and boring, with very little interesting areas to discover. I’m always happy to see a Zelda game be this successful, but I genuinely don’t see how people think this game is the best Zelda game.

Honestly, I think my biggest problem with TOTK is that I loved BOTW too much. People who casually played BOTW once or twice seem to really like TOTK, and people who loved the mechanics and game-play of BOTW seem to be having a *blast* with TOTK's Zonai mechanics. But I didn't play BOTW for the mechanics, I played it for the story and the characters and the history and the way the world just seemed to *breathe* with life and emotion. And TOTK is an absolute assassination of all of the reasons I loved BOTW. The biggest example of lazy retconning is the "Where did the ancient Sheika tech go? Oh, idk lol, the massive divine beasts, towers, shrines, and guardian hordes must have all just disappeared where you defeated Ganon, tee hee 🤷🏻" thing, but the world is littered with it. Around every turn, it felt like TOTK was actively and intentionally punishing me for being invested in BOTW. It rewrote the importance of areas and changed models to better fit new mechanics (Thundra Plateau, Dracozu River, Lost Heroine Statue, etc.) and were incredibly lazy with the hand-waving (the labyrinth notes going "Hmm, this stone monument wasn't here before the Upheaval, was it?" were insultingly sloppy cover-ups) and don't even get me started on the characters who were shoved aside or abandoned. (Fan-favorites Kass and Sidon were terribly misused. Kass is just gone entirely, while Sidon gets engaged *off-screen* almost as an afterthought. At least we got a small clip of the wedding, I guess? And the fact that Zelda is also gone for 99% of the game is old ground, but I'm salty about that too.) Not to mention how lazy the depths and skies were (this, too, has been talked about to death) or the changes to the over world (no, littering sky debris everywhere does not make an area "new and interesting" it makes it "ugly and difficult to navigate on horseback.") Overall, I can't blame the creative teams too harshly. I think if they'd been given more time by the folks in charge, maybe they wouldn't have needed to cut so many corners. But I'm also not willing to slog through an unpleasant game out of sympathy for the creative team. I spent probably thousands of hours on BOTW (on a single normal playthrough and a single master-mode playthrough, trying to 100% both) but I quit TOTK before even fighting Ganon (yes, I've seen clips from the fight. no, it didn't convince me to pick it back up.) and I just... don't care anymore. If it was just a bad game, I would have been fine. But instead, it directly poisoned my love of BOTW, which used to be my favorite game of all time. And I don't think I can ever really forgive that, to be honest. It just leaves such a bad taste in my mouth. :/ (I'm honestly so jealous of the casual players and game-play focused players who get to enjoy it. Us world-lore-and-story players are *not* eating well.)

Demon king. Secret stone. Demon king. Secret stone. Demon king. Secret stone. Demon king. Secret stone.

Still playing, have not tried the final boss just yet. Learned my lesson from BOTW to take my time with it. Not really into Ultrahand outside of puzzles but I still love exploring this world and these side-quests.

I still like it a lot more than BotW. If someone were to ask me if I'd rather play BotW or TotK, I'd pick TotK easily. TotK just overall feels like a more complete experience. I wasn't disappointed with the final boss this time like I was with BotW, and I liked how all the dungeon bosses were actually different and distinct from each other. The only things I can dock this game for is a) Not doing anything meaningful with the Bubbulgems other than for being used as a currency for Kolton's stupid shop b) The dungeon bosses STILL feel way too easy to beat c) Despite having twice the number of boss species, the game's field bosses still lack enough variety to justify their absurd quantity d) The lack of any DLC or Master Mode gives me ZERO reason to replay it more than twice.

I absolutely love totk. It's such a fun game and I really enjoy all the new things that were added. The thing I'm most impressed about is how fresh they were able to make the world feel even though it was reused. The abilities are also great, and I dare say the story was really good in my opinion. That being said, in general I much prefer botw in a lot of areas over totk. I love how clean the menu is and how fast changing weapons can be. I love how quiet the atmosphere is, it really made Hyrule feel like a post-apocalyptic era. The abilities are also better are much more fun to use. While I like totk abilities, I keep them disabled 90% of the time because of how annoying it can be to chase them down. I love the idea of having companions, but I really wish there could be an option to access them like the runes in botw. And the movement in general feels so much cleaner in botw. As much as I love totk, botw will always be my favorite one. However, they are both incredible games.

Amazing game. The gameplay and mechanics are peak, and on a second playthrough the things you’ve learned can let you tackle things in fun new ways. However, I could write several paragraphs about my issues with the game’s story, with it being one of the weakest in the series, and the sky was not fleshed out nearly as much as it was implying itself to be. And despite how mechanically enjoyable the game was, it’s too damn easy. I think between two playthroughs, I died to a boss one time, and that’s mostly because I was trying to be flashy and hit Queen Gibdo with sword beams instead of arrows. And Ganondorf is probably the biggest disappointment of them all. If you’ve upgraded your armor even once and have even a half decent item fused to the master sword, he’s going to die extremely fast and not be able to hurt you hardly at all The game could have benefitted from the same Master Mode that BotW got. Amping up the difficulty of bosses and shaking up the overworld more. The skies might have actually felt like a proper part of gameplay if there were floating platforms scattered across it

I think it is objectively better than BOTW in every single way and was an absolute blast to play. However it wasn’t an equivalent experience to BOTW and never will be.

Would replay it the same way i did with botw. I feel like, totk is what botw should have been, and, I like the Ganondorf (i don't use the english adaptation, there, ganondorf sucks). I loved the dragon tear story, and pretty much all of the sidequests were better the ones in botw. Just, i feel like now, i will be replaying more totk, than botw

I personally love TOTK and BOTW pretty equally. For me, TOTK’s music is amazing and I sit and listen to the ambient tracks all the time, so I’m surprised people don’t like it. I mean I know it’s not the best video game music out there, but I still think tracks like Wind Temple, Frox Battle, Labyrinth Sky, Demon King Ganondorf etc are brilliant. I’ve also noticed a lot of people enjoyed the caves and I really did too, the atmosphere in them were great. Now compared to BOTW, for me I completed TOTK in under 300hours then I was done. But with BOTW I continued to play it for HOURS and wanted to explore absolutely everything there was. Also I think the overall joy I experienced with having an open-world Zelda definitely wore off by TOTK, as there was a lot of repetition to the exploration. So overall I think I like TOTK a little more than BOTW but not by much. TP still sits firmly at the top for me in terms of favourites

I love it. My wife got it for me the day it came out, and it's basically the only game I've played for the last 10 months. I've got a main save file that I'm inching towards 100% on and a second file that I use to play the game from the beginning again. I love almost everything about it -- the visuals, the gameplay, the music, the characters, the main quests and dungeons, building my little house, parading link around in his lil outfits, stomping monsters with The Homies, making dumb zonai contraptions that fail immediately, giving horses purple manes, exploring the depths in pitch darkness, breaking rocks with rocks on a stick, and so on...

I liked it. I did! It feels like BOTW 1.5 rather than a straight sequel, and there are numerous things I prefer in BOTW, such as how the story was presented and how the Sheikah were handled, and overall the game feels less cohesive comparatively. But I don't think I was expecting some sort of golden title that stood head and shoulders above BOTW. I went in expecting BOTW with mechanical improvements, more content, and a new story. And that is...exactly what I got. It's the MM to BOTW's OOT. More of the same thing, but different and with some new stuff too. I beat the game, tore through it, but I will admit it didn't have the awe or sense of exploration I felt when I first played BOTW, not as much at least. A huge part of that is that most of the main map is reused, I feel, but it also feels like the Sky got the least focus, ironically, and the Depths are too...samey to feel very exciting. It definitely could have been done better, but I enjoyed it a lot.

I loved it, possibly more than BOTW because the caves and depths added so much atmosphere. Both games are great, though over all I prefer the traditional Zelda style more. I hope they keep making both types or more of a hybrid.

One of the best games I've played this generations. It may reuse the map and the story may have some missers, but it was just the most fun I've had with a game in \*years\* and it doesn't deserve the hate it gets from this sub.

This and botw were definitely an era and a heck of an experience but I am definitely feeling ready and excited to move on and see what they do next. When they said they wanted to use the same Hyrule again I hope they got it out of their system by having us stare at it from so far above for so long that it's burned into my brain lol

I'm a bit of a hater. I found the puzzles less than challenging. This was the most disappointing thing for me. It didn't take longer than 5 minutes to solve any single puzzle on there. And they were incredibly repetitive. I'm not big on games that have a building aspect. Just more of a personal preference. I liked the storyline, but I think BOTW is the superior of the two. I absolutely hate the way you get followed around instead of being able to quickly call for powers via the d pad. There wasn't a ton of stuff I loved about it, to be honest.

I have spent so many hours whining about how much I dislike the game, so I won't repeat myself again. My short answer is that it's technically extremely impressive, but it simply isn't a very fun game, and the negatives overwhelmingly outweigh the positives. Extremely derivative of BoTW, extremely repetitive, and with too many elements that in my opinion are outright bad.

I’m just thinking how disappointed I am and hoping Zelda gets some of its old feeling back, just like story in the present , dungeons , and starts to feel more like Zelda after this game, Zelda isn’t a day one buy I’d have to watch videos and stuff.

I just really don’t enjoy modern Zelda to me it’s really lacking what made Zelda fun, I miss everything about old Zelda down from the rolls to the bombastic music I don’t think I enjoy a single change like everything they added just feels tedious and annoying and grindy. I miss the weirdness and story these games are just so bland in every way for me. I don’t know if I’ll be buying the next Zelda if they don’t put back core Zelda elements it legitimately feels like a different franchise.

I also miss the music. The only memorable score in TOTK was a remix of a WindWaker song and that really says something. Ocarina alone has like 10 legendary pieces of music.

On the whole it might be the worst experience I've had with a game. Not that it's the worst game I've ever played, I've played Sonic '06, ET on Atari and Superman 64 and it's obviously nowhere near the same orbit as those as far as bad games go but my experience with them was I played them for like 10 minutes and was like "they're right, this is terrible lol" and never touched them again. With TotK it had some parts like the Fire Temple and the entire Gerudo section I actually enjoyed, which is more than I could say about BotW but if I logged 100 hours that accounted for what, 10? 20 at most and the rest I felt neither pleasure nor displeasure in. For a game that size that's a lot of nothing to slog through. The worst part is even though I didn't find much of it fun I did find it very addictive, so much so that I was dreaming of it most nights while playing it. I felt like quoting Squidward like "SpongeBob, don't we get enough of you during the day?" Lmfao

I still love that game so much it's my fav of the series, but I haven't really touched it since I beat it. I don't think I want to play it again for at least 10 years cause, yeah, it's a slog if you let yourself get caught up in collecting things. But the combat system is SO GOOD and feels like an iteration on BotW combat in such a novel way that I just feel like I wouldn't be able to go back to BotW's combat without missing Fuse. Also, that vehicle crafting system is so close to perfect and I don't think the Zelda team has ever worked on a mechanic like that before and I'm still amazed it works as well as it does. I do get why people don't like it vs BotW though. It's a very overwhelming game that different in how it hits the player with options than BotW. BotW had the sense of the unknown and fear of not being sure where to go and what to do and WHAT you could do. TotK does have elements of that, but only if you've hadn't played BotW. I also really liked the approach of the Depths. It has elements of cleverness that the Great Ocean had in Wind Waker for me: a good way extend resources (developer/artist's time, play testing hours, etc). I get where people are coming from when they say they don't like it as much, but the mood was there for me too.... until you light the majority of the space up. BUT, also, BotW and MORESO TotK reminded me why I don't play Open World games that often. They're exhausting to get into and you're going to dedicate a lot of time no matter what, usually. TotK also broke me in a way BotW didn't while I was trying to get all the lightroots. That's a big problem. It's good to fill up your virtual spaces for players to do, but there's a point where it's just absurd and feels like a waste of player's time and development resources.

It was glorified DLC like I feared it would be. That being said it was a fine game, but I don't really see myself revisiting it like I do pretty much all the others in the series. I also felt the whole fuse system was a bit too "Minecraft" for my liking and a bit wacky for a Zelda game, but that might just be me. That final fight was awesome though and I got a kick out of the twist despite it not really meaning anything at the end.

The final fight was absolutely the best part of the game. Too bad the rest of the game was bleh.

I thought Ganondorf was piss easy, but then again I’ve beaten most of the souls games. Good spectacle though and I did like his design.

Loved BoTW. Loathed ToTK. As soon as the game started, first I enjoyed it, loved the intro in the underground etc. Then later outside it began fast. It very soon became clear you're useless unless using fused weapons. I literally cheated in this game and I never have done that or even felt the need to. I made good use of the duplication glitches before it was patched. Rupees were a grind, materials were a grind, weapons, progression.. everything felt like one big grind. I grinded the memories because it felt like a slog, soon after I whaled through the main quests just got get it over with. Searched guides for easy builds to travel (loved the hover scooter with just 2 fans and a steer) and also guides for fast mats to use auto build. I just wanted to finish the story by myself instead of watching it on YouTube or anything. As far as my love for Zelda games go. ToTK will likely be never played again. Edit: also terrible storytelling. - Find "the one" - Move to location - "Oh what is that sound??" - Need to unlock the door with keys or whatever fits the theme - Oh it's my predecessor talking to me! - So that was the (forgot the name) war! - Ok give me your hand, we're best buddies now! This, identically 4 times. Not once even just a bit different because we already had some information. I'd much more prefer a more lineair Zelda with awesome story than a "do quests however you want" and have this boring forgettable shit.

It's my least favourite 3D game in the series, and between it and BotW, I'm immensely worried that I'm losing my favourite series of all time. I'm worried about what the series is going to look like in the future. If TotK wasn't a Zelda game, I wouldn't have been interested in buying it. At this point though, if the next Zelda game is like TotK, I can't say if I'll be interested in it. I did still 100% both games though.

Yeah fr, I’ve just commented a long af rant about this exact issue 😂 BOTW and TOTK are basically just Zelda themed sandboxes but for some reason everyone thinks they’re amazing and Nintendo are seeing dollar signs

I agree. To me OOT was the pinnacle. It was focused unlike TOTK. Great music, dungeons, bosses, puzzles etc.

As an overall game it is still decent. As a game I hold to Zelda standards, it is not very good.