The Legend of Zelda - Tears of the Kingdom(use spoiler tags!)

Done 3 temples so far and it's more of a puzzle then having good couple of enemies everywhere. Just some random scattered around. I used to like it when you enter a room and the door gets shut until you beat the enemy in a dungeon.
I did the wind one, got fed up with the fire one so will come back to it later.

Like the devine beasts in botw to me these are the weakest part of the game.
 
Finished the game this evening. My GOTY thus far by a large margin. Titles like Starfield, Spider-man 2 and FF 16 are going to have go some to surpass it. There is a serious amount of content, creativity & design that has been poured into TotK. It's quite astounding what Nintendo have been able to do with the Switch - still wish we had a Switch 2, though !
 
I totally cheesed the Fire Temple, in fact I'm not sure I did any of them in the order in which they're "supposed" to be tackled.

They're not 1:1 like Zelda of old, in which there is a clear pathway to completion - I know for a fact I just climbed my way around completing the Fire Temple, probably taking me longer than if I'd have put effort into using my brain to complete it, but we press on.

I also ended up climbing around for the last 2 though it took me ages but abit like Skyrim, you just sort of commit to ridiculous climbing, clipping. I'm far less keen in the indoor environments myself, the deep, prefer the outdoor and especially sky levels.
 
I have now been playing off and on quite a bit. I have just finished the 4th temple. I got into the habit of doing the temple and unlocking the boss then traveling elsewhere to do a bit of gathering to get some food and some other exploring... Often do that for a couple of hours then go back to the temple and finish it. I completely forgot about a couple of areas that were in BOTW and i am pretty certain there are more places i havnt been to that were in BOTW. Not really explored the sky area or much of the depths.
 
Just finished the first Sky island - enjoying it a lot so far.

I hope there is a good amount of story to follow because I tend to lose interest with sandbox games.
 
I’m about 20-30 hours in, having gone in completely blind from playing Breath of the Wild. Haven’t read any posts…. No ‘detail specific’ spoilers please! :p

Just thought I’d share my thoughts - they are actually sort of ‘mixed’! This post contains my general impressions of gameplay and some new features, but nothing ‘truly spoilery’, IMO. I’ve been deliberately vague where appropriate.

The most important thing: core gameplay is generally excellent as per BOTW. Exploring and combat is great fun etc.

Some minor gripes from BOTW have been carried over, particularly this annoying ‘noble / regal’ dialogue from Zelda and others… could they be more annoying?! Doesn’t really impact the gameplay though.

Some minor wins carry over too. I really love the dynamic music in the dungeons and the lead up to them (OK I’ve only done one so far… but it was excellent with the audio).

So here’s my major reservation… it DOES just feel like DLC for BOTW, doesn’t it? Or, like a ‘mod’.

Gone are the old ‘special powers’, replaced with ‘slightly less obvious’ ones. We also have ‘building and fusing / crafting’ as major mechanics. On one hand, I like that this makes for a more unconventional puzzle solving. On the other, I think the building and (particularly the weapon crafting) is adding quite a bit of ‘fiddle’ to the BOTW formula.

The main world is pretty much the same save for some aesthetic overhaul, very much DLC feeling in that regard. I generally don’t mind, it’s a cool map, but I do very much dislike the dump of ‘building materials’ all over the map, which feels silly and ‘for the sake of the game mechanic’. For the feel of a ‘brand new game’, I really do think they should have gone with a ‘brand new map’.

The shrines are back. Again, it’s good, but I have done this before.

There are ‘two new main areas’ which are very intriguing at first and I do like the expanded scoped but one of them does feel a little bland after playing around in it for a while.

So it’s ‘extra content BOTW+ with slightly more emphasis on fiddle’. I mean, it’s great… I’m not ‘underwhelmed’ per se… but it’s very much more ‘more of the same’.

Looking forward to spending more timing with it and seeing if my views change.

Edit: I forgot to add… the art style is excellent and carries the performance issues, but the graphical performance is almost embarrassing at this point. Going from the RE4 remake on PC to this is jarring on the eyes :o it doesn’t materially affect the gameplay but… yeah, it’s really not good. A higher resolution and FPS would sort it because, again, the art style is fine.

After playing this a little further than mentioned here… I went abroad for a week in May and just haven’t picked it back up since. It just didn’t feel fresh enough.

This review by one of my favourite YouTubers suggests that I’m not alone in feeling like this game feels like a great big weird mod.


(Truly great YouTuber btw - well worth a subscribe)

Not sure if I will boot it up again anytime soon.
 
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After playing this a little further than mentioned here… I went abroad for a week in May and just haven’t picked it back up since. It just didn’t feel fresh enough.

This review by one of my favourite YouTubers suggests that I’m not alone in feeling like this game feels like a great big weird mod.


(Truly great YouTuber btw - well worth a subscribe)

Not sure if I will boot it up again anytime soon.
I've not played for about the last 2 weeks, the fire temple annoyed me and is as dull as the devine beasts were.

I will carry on as totk is a great game but I think I prefer botw overall. There are aspects to it which are superior but it doesn't have the same impact that botw did in 2017.
 
We're all different, and it's a shame that not everyone is enjoying it. It's the GOTY for me, and I doubt anyting will surpass it ( Bethesda is guaranteed to **** up Starfield in some way ). I can semi understand the opinion that it feels like a big DLC for BotW, but my counter argument would be the sheer amount of content that has been packed into this game, new abilities eg. ultrahand which provide the player with a lot more freedom to explore/be creative and the much more involved story line. Also, surely any Zelda game has to be set in Hyrule ? It would seem bizarre for the game to be set somewhere unrelated. Between BotW and TotK the latter is the better game, for me. But I acknowledge that without BotW, TotK wouldn't exist.
 
We're all different, and it's a shame that not everyone is enjoying it. It's the GOTY for me, and I doubt anyting will surpass it ( Bethesda is guaranteed to **** up Starfield in some way ). I can semi understand the opinion that it feels like a big DLC for BotW, but my counter argument would be the sheer amount of content that has been packed into this game, new abilities eg. ultrahand which provide the player with a lot more freedom to explore/be creative and the much more involved story line. Also, surely any Zelda game has to be set in Hyrule ? It would seem bizarre for the game to be set somewhere unrelated. Between BotW and TotK the latter is the better game, for me. But I acknowledge that without BotW, TotK wouldn't exist.

Not that it’s a major point, but are you sure? Link’s Awakening, Majora’s Mask, Windwaker, Skyward Sword all deviated from that significantly, even if there were connections to Hyrule in those games.

Ultimately, the game just lacks the freshness of BotW and as such it’s probably easier to land the same criticisms as BotW: the wonder and discovery made it a particular joy to play through the first time. I guess I never completed BotW a second time for the same reasons that it’s hard for me to pick TotK back up.
 
The only struggle I really have at the moment is just the scale of it - it's huge and I can well imagine for anyone who has relatively recently played through BOTW it's a bit tedious feeling to have to do all the map discovery again. It's not a pick up and play for an hour here and there type of game for me, so i'm only picking it up when I know i've got a window of a few hours to play through an element of the game.

Reusing the base of the map was always going to be a challenge as it will end up feeling too familiar to many people, there's enough there to keep me interested though and i'm personally enjoying the 'rediscovery' to see how things have changed alongside the newer areas.
 
I've never thought I would see the day I was glad a Zelda game was over, by the end I just wanted it to end. :(

The weapons durability really began to annoy me this time to the point my whole game stopped until I got the master sword.

The underworld was also poorly done, the best thing about BOTW and TOTK was you looked out over the land and you know you could go there. The underworld felt like you were in a dark room looking for the light switch, that’s not the spirit of the game imo. When you do light it up it becomes an interesting place, so hiding it didn’t work for me.

That said I loved the art style and Character design in this one.
 
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I'm a little disheartened to read people didn't enjoy it so much. I am not too far in just done a few things after doing the starting island and shrines and Im loving it so far. I hated weapon breaking in the last game and it feels worse in this one somehow but I can live with it I think.
 
I'm a little disheartened to read people didn't enjoy it so much. I am not too far in just done a few things after doing the starting island and shrines and Im loving it so far. I hated weapon breaking in the last game and it feels worse in this one somehow but I can live with it I think.

I'm loving it, it seems more alive than BOTW which had vast empty spaces. Finished most of the main story and still enjoying it.
 
I'm a little disheartened to read people didn't enjoy it so much. I am not too far in just done a few things after doing the starting island and shrines and Im loving it so far. I hated weapon breaking in the last game and it feels worse in this one somehow but I can live with it I think.
Don’t worry about it and enjoy. It’s a wonderful game I think. So many incredible ideas that others will be copying for years to come. Just like they did with BoTW.
 
I went from not being able to put it down to struggling to pick it back up again. Even when I can't be arsed playing anything else, I'd rather just sit and watch TV or do something else than play it which is odd because I was really enjoying it.
 
I seem to enjoy the wandering in the darkness underneath the main world really enjoyable and spend a lot of time down there searching around.
 
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Christ the fire temple is annoying.

The bit for the last padlock where you have to build a massive bridge out of tiny pieces of rock, and if it falls there's no way to recover it so you have to start again. I've never found any part of a Zelda game as close to being as annoying as this. Yes, you have a great new tool Nintendo, but I've spent ******* ages this morning sticking rock together and it's not fun
 
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