![]() ![]() Narratively, TOTK kinda… sucks? I mean, thematically it’s a bunch of rehashed old status quo garbage that Polygon does an excellent job going into. System overlapping system coalescing in the final battle in such a way to make you feel desperate, powerful, and righteous. And _then_ we take to the skies where the sun and my girlfriend the dragon can heal all my gloom and I can eat my fill and get my working hearts back up into the twenties. Not only is it a credible threat (taking my heart containers? That requires four shrines or a temple to get!), not only does it extend the fight (my “working hearts” are untouched, so I still have five of those), it _also_ keeps the amount of my available hearts at a low enough level that I feel unsettled. Don’t worry, this next attack won’t kill you outright because you can’t heal beyond those five hearts: instead it’ll take one of your gloom-eaten max hearts! This is clever. So we’re fighting in the depths, and DK’s the master of Gloom, so I keep losing max hearts to gloom and, crap, I’ve eaten the last of my sundelion meals that’ll get me those hearts back, and I’m down to a total of five red hearts. No worries, the Master Sword is back and unbreakable for the DK fight (nicely done, devs, though a little game-y). But my Master Sword ran out of energy before I faced the Demon King. I went in with a full line plus about five hearts. ![]() Decent dungeon crawl (I finally remembered to use my travel medallions), some clever damage manipulation to make the final boss feel desperate without actually killing me.Īctually, let’s talk about that a little more. I did rather enjoy the ending, mechanically. Too much clothing, too little to make me want to wear any of it. And that was just the core sets: all the nostalgia sets I found pieces of? I just left them in the bottom of the bag. Outfits: Did upgrades get more expensive? It was hard to find enough rupees to upgrade my armour (which was the hint screen’s only advice when I biffed it in front of a monster).It’s thankless work lighting the underdark. And having to open it up piecemeal by lightroot? Pretty nifty if all you’re doing is lighting lamps in the dark from time to time… but there’s a reason the overworld has only 15 towers. ![]() The underdark: more isn’t more if it’s empty and you have to walk the whole length.For traversal, I’d much rather grab one of my horses (named Horace, Hoarse, Horus, Epona, Bill, or Ted). Vehicles: maybe I’ve lost the sense of childish wonder, but I didn’t care about crafting vehicles unless it was the thing I needed to do to solve the puzzle in front of me.Fuse-ing things to weapons never felt fun. Weapons: making them break even more frequently just made me want to engage in combat even less.(I liked the ‘the floor is lava’ one where you needed to land on a bull’s eye, though). It feels like that’s literally half of all the koroks, though. Koroks: euf, I was done yeeting campers to their camps within the first dozen hours.Where are the people who are supposed to use those supply caches to rebuild homes? Where are the rebuilt homes themselves?)… but quantity isn’t necessarily quality: More people on the roads, more signs of life… (though not enough for a kingdom on the rebound. And there’s more of that then before, not because of the multiple levels of the world (because the sky and underdark are both very formulaic where they aren’t empty) but because of the higher density of stuff to do in Hyrule. But all of it feels custom-built to be enjoyed with childlike playfulness. There’s precious little about Hyrule (over, on, or under) that feels like a world that exists when you aren’t looking at it (or even when you are). As I mentioned on Mastodon (come follow me on Mastodon), there’s some whiplash between any/every stable’s predictable form and repetitive “clues” and blah blah blah… and the nightmare-fuel gloom monster or demon king’s glowing-veined eyes.īut overall, it’s a lovely playground. Why do all the NPCs sound the same except for their (annoying) barks?) over and over again… good feeling gone. ![]() Every second person telling me the same thing in the same words (gosh, designers worked so much expressiveness into the things that Link could do or touch or own or craft. Figuring out I could rewind the pieces of fallen debris to ascend to sky islands (or just to glide to the next shrine) felt great because I felt like I figured it out myself. It is still show-don’t-tell mechanically (which I like), but tell-don’t-show narratively (which I don’t). But you wouldn’t call FIFA2023 a sequel to FIFA2022 just because it had more stadiums (stadia? No, that’s done) and players and recent rules updates. Never Look at the Data: Why did we start getting so many pings from Korea?īut it’s the same game as Breath of the Wild.So I’ve Finished: Horizon: Forbidden West.So I’ve Finished: The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. ![]()
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