The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom (2023)

I am moving this to my backlog. I think playing BotW for the second time not long before this game was announced made me grow tired of this version of Hyrule, and it feels like I am playing BotW all over again...

So I will put in on hold and get back to it later. I don't think we will have a mainline Zelda game in for a while anyways, so I'm not in a rush at all.

The game is filled with tons of... well... filler.

Initial hours were AWESOME, as the sky island was basically made to use everything you have. Once you get to the surface... it just looks like BotW 2.0, and no, that's not good.

You get some new powers (lose some others), but everything else is almost the same. Same story progression (initial place, you go to the same 4 places where you had to go in BotW), same world (yep, new things, most are just... fillers), new zones are a mess (I don't get the underground. It's just getting the map noise of surface, making it a -1, and that's all, like not much creativity there), and sky islands were repetitive.

To be honest, I'm a bit biased as I don't really like BotW's approach that much. I loved the old formula way too much, and really dislike the fact that here, you have everything at the start. It felt as in older games, everything was "hand-made", whereas on these, it's just "let's give them a lot of content they can do, so they just explore the whole map, no matter if it's fun or not". I don't feel things as connected and well designed as they were in all the previous 3D entrances.

I finally went back to TOTK while visiting family for the holiday. I had the Water, Desert and Spirit (if you even want to consider it a dungeon) Temple remaining. Overall, my opinion of the game hasn't changed. I did feel like the end game was fairly half-baked. I didn't feel like going through the long grind to max out an armor set, so the late game enemies could almost one shot me while also inflicting gloom. It's frustrating that you need to go to the different dragons multiple times, who have unreliable locations since they can go underground or above ground making finding them both tedious and annoying, since you can only acquire one item from a dragon at a time...

In general, I felt like the gloom mechanic wasn't well developed since it was basically an annoying mechanic that was negated through food or an armor sets. It probably would have been better to have a quest that removed the Gloom as an alternative and show progression in the game world. The water temple boss was pretty annoying to fight with the oil mechanic, making it more frustrating than enjoyable. I also found the entire sequence where you pilot a mech to be incredibly janky and lame. You would think controlling a gigantic mech would be a fun change of pace... instead I had to avoid enemies because they were all damage sponges and could kill me in a few hits... talk about a major let down... then it all culminated into a lackluster boss fight... Ganondorf was alright. Certainly a steep increase in difficulty compared to the rest of the game (which is essentially a cozy vibe), requiring you to master the flurry attack mechanic. In general, flurry attack felt less reliable to me compared to BOTW which did make this last fight a bit frustrating. I did like the build up to the fight and it was a good call having the final quest be to search for Ganondorf. Where he ends up being makes sense, though it wasn't as obvious for me since I hadn't played the game in months prior. So the details weren't fresh in my mind.