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

I have such mixed emotions on this game due to my own situation. Thoroughly enjoying it when I get to play and there is just so much to explore, which is totally my jam. The issue I am having is my kids. I totally want them to enjoy the game too but they are using my save. They love building, shooting arrows all over the place, experimenting with the systems, jumping around and accidentally falling to their death then consuming a fairy, talking to people and triggering new quests, making food, and more. This often breaks a bunch of weapons and shields, consumes zonai devices, and leaves my save in a state that I don’t quite know what was happening and/or I need to grind a bunch to replenish resources.

They are not nearly as devoted to the game so it would be difficult to start their own save and get to the point where they could have the same fun with all the abilities unlocked and the map revealed. I can manually save and then roll back after they play but it still keeps any new quests and certain other discoveries that are triggered.

I love hearing all the things they find and building creations they make but I am now at the point where I want to finish the game off and that means conserving resources a bit to make sure I have enough for fusing or cooking or upgrading. Anyone else have this problem and figure out a solution?

I beat it! Holy moly that finale is a thrill.

I grumped about a few niggles in the game and I still think BotW is the better game overall, but the final boss sequences in this are infinitely better than BotW.

Twilight Princess always had the best final battle, with the 4 phases of Ganondorf in that game... but TotK may be my new favourite... although that could be "recent-cy bias" talking so time will tell.

My GotY, so far.

This game adds so much to the original BOTW but does so little to fix any of its major shortcomings; weapons still break far too quickly even with fusion, climbing during the rain is still an arduous pain in the ass even with the new rain potions which I swear are bugged or something because they just BARELY make any difference at all. The dungeons still are some of the weakest in the franchise, the story has the same problem of where most of the story happens in flashbacks and very little meaningful and interesting things happen in the present. The shrines are still repetitive and there are WAY too many them making them a chore to complete instead of a fun challenge to overcome after a while. Even with the Zonai contraptions it still takes forever to travel across land and most of the time your vehicles will take you maybe 1% of the way across the map before evaporating and leaving you to walk on foot. So many sidequests give you the lamest rewards for completing them like 50 rupees or 10 amber and stuff like that and after a while I just didn't want to do side quests anymore because the quests were boring and the rewards were just not worth the effort.

To go to the positives, since this game is basically BOTW with new bells and whistles, the fundamental gameplay is still fun, I love the amount of freedom the game gives you and how you can pretty much go wherever you want. One of the few things they really DID improve from BOTW was the boss fights which are MUCH better, they're much more diverse and interesting and are much more fun to fight, even if the dungeons were mostly kind of boring I always had the boss fights to look forward to. Like BOTW, I think the game starts of really strong but I ultimately feel like the game suffers from a thousand papercuts of little and big issues for me to truly love it and I really wanted to love it but all of these nagging problems are just something I could not ignore.

Honestly I can go on and on about all the gripes I have with this game, after 6 years of development and for being the latest installment of my favorite video game franchise I expected so much more.

A definite upgrade to breath of the wild, though still not a full feeling Zelda game.

The story is far more compelling and fills in several gaps from the last game. It even REQUIRES that you experience the story if you want to do things like, get the master sword, or complete the main quest line, something it's predecessor failed at miserably.

The weapon degradation is more easily overcome because of the ability to craft the weapons you like with monster parts and sticks. And the overall vehicle and machine building is as basic and complex as you could want. Some people are even capable of building computers and music devices with what they can find in the game.

Dungeons make a reappearance and use familiar levels of gimmickry from traditional Zelda games; however, they still feel slightly half baked since the powers that they "require" you to use can almost entirely be overcome if you don't want to to run through them in the intended way. Looking at you specifically Fire temple! The inclusion of the depths and sky islands really does make the game feel so much larger and more alive than the previous iteration, however I wish they had just gone a hair further with them. There just aren't a lot of sky islands to explore, especially when compared to the literal 1:1 recreation of the over world when you are in the depths. As such the sky islands just don't feel fully complete or like they are maybe missing something. The depths meanwhile are so open and spread out that I almost felt like there wasn't enough down there to truly justify the 1:1 map recreation. As cool as that was to see id have rather seen smaller, denser areas that were in the depths. The fights with the yiga clan were fun, but short. And the skydiving races were challenging but after beating one they become exponentially easier as you kept completing them. Hopefully the DLC they release will be better, but a game shouldn't need DLC to be better.

Overall as a LoZ fan this game is far better than breath of the wild ever was, but as a gamer I'm still left wanting a better game for the series to hang it's hat on in the way they seem to be doing so with tears of the kingdom.

Its good. While the tutorial kind of sucks, the first 10 hours are quite exciting. After that the flaws come out, and the cracks begin to appear. Most things are between a light to a large step back from Breath of the Wild, save for combat which I think is a notable step forward.

Thankfully the game picks up in the last 10 hours once you Go for the Gerudo temple, look for the 5th sage and run the final boss.

But yeah, that entire middle section between the initial 10 hours and last 10 is rough. I don't see myself ever returning to this unless I want to write a real review for it.

Finished TotK today and wow, what a magnificent finale that was.

I was invested in the story since the beginning, and got hyped through every main plot beat every time one of the sages awakened their powers. But man, seeing that final glyph memory - Zelda's sacrifice as she gives up her humanity for the mere hope of saving the future - it just shook me in a way I wasn't expecting. I had already suspected something along those lines after seeing the memory where Rauru hints there's no real way to time travel back, but the sheer tragedy of the idea she might have become the dragon had me in denial.

Then there's the entire setpiece of the final battle, with Ganondorf also swallowing the secret stone and becoming a dragon himself, and then Zelda coming to your aid, never letting you fall off and keeping you on the battlefield... I'm in awe. Just, pure awe.

I was actually bummed by the idea that she would be stuck in that form forever, so when I saw Rauru and Sonia help turn her back to her original form, man, there's no easy way to describe the joy I felt. I've see some people complain that allowing her to turn back to a hylian kind of removes the weight of her sacrifice, and while I might intelectually agree with that take, I just... so strongly wanted her to be well, as if I was a person living in that world and not a spectator consuming a story. As Link skyfalls to grab her hand, finally, marking complete the main quest entry. This might just be the first time in my life where a 'save the princess' story has made me feel this way. The princess saved the Kingdom... and Link saved the princess.

As for the gameplay itself, there was something about the moment to moment in this game that felt just a little bit more tedious, a little bit slower than in BotW. Whereas I got completely lost in BotW from beginning to end, playing through TotK there were many moments where I saw a shrine and didn't really want to clear it, SO MANY times where I just wanted to skip Korok missions, and sometimes even town/stable sidequests that I wanted to skip. This even bled over to exploration, with the sky islands in particular feeling like such an annoyance to explore.

I still need to mull it over a little more to figure out if it's from me having played BotW when I was in a frame of mind to consume a huge, open world game, with more patience to methodically explore the world and its secrets, or if it's something intrinsic to the mechanics in TotK, the way fusion controls (having to drop an item, switch to the next weapon you want to fuse, press the fuse button and then press the weapon button feels like SO MANY STEPS for what could have something you could do within the menu. Having to craft each individual arrow at the time of shooting also adds up to the feeling of sluggishness the combat has in this game compared to BotW). Building too was never not a pain. I was hoping I'd come around to the mechanic, but it never stopped feeling slow and tedious. And it's hard to say it's a big, damning issue with the gameplay, but these small details together add up in a way that just completely saps me of my momentum.

And yet, it's impossible to call TotK a worse game than BotW - it simply has so much more, more quests, more enemies, more variety, more engagement with materials, more story, more NPCs, more areas, more challenge.

Anyways, in the end...

Just...

Daaaaaamn dude, that final rendition of Zelda's lullaby! So damn good!!

PERFECT! WHAT A FINALE!!

I"It reached you... after all."

I love this ending.