#Anyways I am still VERY in love with TotK. It's consumed way too much of my time

[pixelsjoy]

Me playing Tears of the Kingdom: As much as I miss the champions, it makes sense they're not mentioned much. It's been a hundred years since they died. Even if they survived the Calamity, most of them would probably be dead at this point. The only exception being Mipha, who would have been the only one that would still be alive if she survived the calamity due to her age. The reason they're still remembered so much in Breath of the Wild is because the Divine Beasts, one of the last remaining connections to them, are still active and looming in Hyrule. Impa also said that their spirits feel uneasy knowing their task of defeating the Calamity wasn't done. They were at peace when the Calamity was defeated and passed on. They're not brought up from that point on because them and their era are over and can be laid to rest.

Also me playing Tears of the Kingdom: - holding back tears - Damn I miss the champions

#LIKE YEAH. I GET IT FROM A THEMATIC POINT. BUT FROM A 'SIR THOSE ARE MY FAVORITE CHARACTERS' POINT. I AM ACHING #I love the sages in TotK! Don't get me wrong! #I mean look at my icon tee hee #But I've grown so attached to the champions their absence feels so off. I'm fifty-fifty on it #I wanna be clear: Big agree with people who say the Sheikah Shrines and tech being suddenly gone feels off #It's unexplained and feels far too significant to easily write off #I feel similar about the champions and how little they're mentioned in game #I don't think Zelda even has a single line of dialogue that mentions them. #She and Link lived through the calamity and knew them as friends #At least a tiny mention would have made sense since she does briefly talk about the Calamity with Sonia and Rauru #I guess it makes a little sense?? In regards to the developers wanting to be hush hush about BotW spoilers for newcomers #But the way they went about it is like they tried to forget it happened. It doesn't feel right. #This might also be my biased speaking cause the original sages? Cool and all #But they feel so hollow compared to the characters that the champions had #Anyways I am still VERY in love with TotK. It's consumed way too much of my time #But I also wanted to talk about this gripe dhdjfjejfjd #Thank you for coming to my TED talk. I'm sorry this is a whole wall of spilling #Anyways will I cope by remembering Age of Calamity is a thing despite how much it obliterates the timeline? #Dang right #Tears of the Kingdom #Breath of the Wild #TotK Spoilers #LoZ TotK #Loz BotW #BotW Champions #Long Post

[pyukumukuus]

i finished totk yesterday and wanna put my thoughts somewhere

SPOILERS AHEAD DUH

i think playing this immediately after botw maybe caused me to get a bit oversaturated with the game about half way through since the gameplay is so similar.... the gameplay being so similar isn't a bad thing as such because the gameplay is very good, but i think if i had not played botw so recently maybe i wouldn't have felt that dip in enthusiasm.

although that said, i do think the best and most consuming part of both botw and totk is when you have just few enough hearts that the game feels really challenging but you are getting strong enough that you are starting to find cool weapons and unlock black tier enemies, so it's possible that i reached saturation point at the same time in both games when i started getting 'too strong'.

anyway....

the sky

the sky was cool but i didn't spend anywhere near as much time in it as i thought i would from the trailer, mostly i think because it was so hard to traverse. it was also quite samey and i hated those shrines where you had to carry a crystal for miles.

hyrule

i loved all the new bits to hyrule like the caves, the wells (the wells!!!!), and death mountain cooling down and being fully traversable. i did however think that too much of hyrule was the same as in botw. i was excited to see rito village covered in snow, but became very disappointed when the entire region simply returned to how it was in botw after finishing the dungeon. with the exception of eldin, i felt like the whole map was pretty much the same as it had been in botw and there was more much incentive to explore it all again, expecially after recently playing botw.

the shrines were a lot better in this game, but i still found myself thinking 'ugh' on some level whenever i found one, especially later on in the game. i did, however, love the ones that were like eventide island and stripped you of all your gear.

i would have liked to see more settlements like lookout landing and some bigger changes to the existing settlements.

the depths

conceptually i love the depths and when i first set foot in there i was stunned because it did not feature in the trailers. it feels eerie and truly challenging. i love how the dragons can show up in there, i love that it is unsettlingly warm at 23 degrees C, i loved the yiga clan and master kohga, the spirit temple, and how you can jump into a chasm and just be engulfed in darkness with nothing for miles.

however as the game went on i started finding it tedious to explore. like the sky, it was a bit samey. the treasure was hit and miss; i remember taking almost two hours to find my way to an X on my map which turned out to be a pair of trousers which cost far too much in money/resources to upgrade and i have not even worn once.

i would have liked some more explanation for some of the things in the depths, like why it had non-decayed weapons despite all the gloom, what those spirits holding the weapons were, why the lightroots matched up so perfectly with the shrines on the surface, and why every significant hyrule location had a corresponding significant depths location. maybe i missed some info somewhere along the line but i felt the depths was a bit bare lore-wise.

the zonai abilities

fuse - honestly i never got bored of this. banana sword. egg spear. president hudson shield. this was seriously the coolest way to mod weapons.

ultrahand - wicked and cool but i am so lazy when it comes to building contraptions.

autobuild - i probably built like 200 super springs and not much else.

rewind - cool but i kept forgetting i had this.

ascend - this was so handy and i used it way more than i thought i would. loading times are a bitch though...

the dungeons

i thought the dungeons were average. i was glad to see them return, but i still think they aren't really a patch on the fan favourites of OOT and twilight princess. lightning temple was super cool though.

i think the build up to the dungeons was vastly improved on botw. i liked climbing all the way up to the wind temple with tulin, and the zero gravity stuff was really awesome for the water temple.

i did feel that because you can do the dungeons in any order, this actually harmed the storytelling because it meant every memory acquired after beating the dungeon had to be exactly the same. oh what's that? zelda, the sage of time, appeared to you and warned you of a great threat in the future??? who'd have thought???

the spirit temple was awesome and i love that i stumbled upon it totally by accident, however i have to admit that later on i did end up feeling a bit disappointed with the quest order. i had already beaten the spirit temple and found the master sword before entering hyrule castle re. zelda's appearance - this meant that after completing that quest my next quest was simply to.... go straight back to the castle. i think because totk is more story-heavy it would have benefitted from being a bit more more linear. some of the events of this game are a bit of an anti-climax because they are presented to you in such a weird order.

the memories

i really enjoyed unlocking the memories even though, again, the order you find them in is not fixed and can end up being kind of weird because of it. like you can find a memory in which zelda is talking about her insane plan to turn herself into a dragon so that she can wait 10,000 years to give link the master sword, and then you find a memory that confirms that yes, zelda has indeed travelled back in time!

i got spoiled for the fact that zelda was the light dragon and i am pissed about that, because i think that is a really awesome twist, especially the part where you find out the master sword has been with the dragon all along. i wish i'd had the opportunity to be genuinely surprised by that, but i didn't, thanks to someone on youtube who didn't tag their spoilers 1 week after the game released :)

the sages

tulin is best boy, yunobo is okay, everyone else is kinda trash (especially my beautiful boy sidon :( ). i like the concept of mineru's construct but in practice she just gets in the way all the time and i cannot control her.

the final fight

the final fight was good, a lot better than botw and with better buildup too. i loved having to enter the castle from the depths. ganondorf was genuinely hard for me to beat (because i'm really shit at flurry rushing) and the fact that your hearts get knocked off permanently too had me thinking i would have to bail out and come back after some practice and a lot more food.

conceptually i loved the final dragon vs. dragon showdown but that part of the fight was too easy and a bit of an anti-climax.

the ending

i'm not gonna lie the ending did disappoint me. i really wish zelda had stayed as the light dragon - rauru/sonia/link transforming her back (and fixing link's arm?!) just felt like a weird deus ex machina and rendered zelda's big forbidden sacrifice as basically pointless. i think zelda saving hyrule from great peril but with no knowledge of who she was or why she did it would have been more emotional and poignant and bittersweet.

i read a post someone made about how they wished link had taken ganondorf's secret stone and eaten it in the ending it to transform himself into a dragon and reunite with zelda in immortality..... and honestly i am so down for that

(no i don't give a shit about what that would have done to the tIMELINE)

final verdict

this game was incredible..... but i am left feeling weird. i feel like going back to botw now will feel incredibly bland in comparison to totk, however it is precisely because of botw that some things in totk felt bland, such as the similar gameplay, lack of change to hyrule, and the fact that we had to do shrines and collect koroks again.

it is hard to summarise how i feel about this game. i feel that it is so much better than botw in every way and i would probably not play botw again now that i have totk, and yet, i still think botw is the better game. i think botw hit harder, simply because it was the first zelda game to do anything like that, and now the only way to make a game hit like that again is to do something totally different.

#zelda #totk #spoilers