The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom
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I'm starting the 4th story area which is in the desert. Overall I have been enjoying the game, but it's something where after the first bunch of hours my enjoyment of the game has dipped a bit and am getting to the point that I am ready to do everything I need to do to finish the game. Up to a point it's fun to explore, but the map is so massive just counting the main map that it becomes tiring to me after a point. While there are certain improvements compared to BOTW, it's still an open world game that never got me super engaged with BOTW either.
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I finished the game, if I were a few years younger I would have actually cried from how much passion and love was put into this.. Despite its little flaws, this is still the definitive game of utmost passion and a master stroke of gameplay, art direction, world-building and plot. There is so much more to say, especially if you have been a long-time Zelda fan and you can see how this legacy is only possible because so many people have written for the history of hyrule and the many games that built up upon it. What a fucking game, thank you Nintendo for showing how it should be done in a world of unfinished released AAA games, micro-transactions and conditioned shorter attention spans. This goes down in gaming history so fucking hard.
This is a story of two, please for the love of god I hope everyone gets the true ending and all the tears. For the best cinematic experience, get the sword tear last. It is the smallest geoglyph.
The requirements for it are easy, just clear all quests under "main story quests".
Spoilers for ending
All in all, I'll miss this game and I'll miss Hyrule but I will revisit it from time to time. I don't usually, or I never really, do this for games I finish. The whole reason I'm still around in these forums is because I am more of a plot person so I'll end something after I reach the story ending and never look back, this is one game that I don't see happening because of how alive it is. In terms of how much love is put into a game, this is number 1. From the music, the gameplay, the world, the characters and the art direction. You can tell that everyone who worked on this fucking loved it.
Ranking the temples in terms of aesthetics/design and gameplay choices/how enjoyable they were, this includes getting there:- Wind Temple
- Thunder Temple
- Water Temple
- Fire Temple
This also includes their position in terms of how they affected the general feel of the world (like a huge blizzard to the Rito village felt a lot more impactful and atmospheric compared to the Goron's). I didn't include the Underground one but if I did it would be between Thunder and Water. Thunder, simple as it is, drew a lot on the Egyptian culture and the Pyramids so that's an easy rank up for me. A big, big shout out to the music, the OST will be looping for years to come when I do my work.
Did I say how good this game was? This game was very good.
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Over 100 hours and only now the game tells me you can call your companions back to you by whistling.
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Ok, finished the desert stuff and some of the stuff that happens shortly after that has definitely piqued my interest. Also got back into the mood to explore some more areas I haven't been to, mainly so I can gather upgrade materials because I am getting bodied by some of these enemies.
Also, only just now realized that you can increase slots in the outpost area. Somehow I missed that and assumed once I could get to a certain place that's where I would be able to, but nope, been available to me for the past 30 something hours. Smh
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@The-Franky-Tank said in The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom:
Also, only just now realized that you can increase slots in the outpost area. Somehow I missed that and assumed once I could get to a certain place that's where I would be able to, but nope, been available to me for the past 30 something hours. Smh
Yeah, they really could have made that more obvious.
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@Nobodyman
in spoilers on how to farm rupees/ores faster just in case someone wants to discover it themselves
nothing plot related -
@The-Franky-Tank said in The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom:
Also, only just now realized that you can increase slots in the outpost area. Somehow I missed that and assumed once I could get to a certain place that's where I would be able to, but nope, been available to me for the past 30 something hours. Smh
Yeah I struggled for that too. I could not remember where Noia said he was going and it was not written in the quest. At least I had lots of nuts when I found him :-)
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Finished the game earlier tonight and had a fantastic time overall. The fusion and building systems make the world feel a whole lot more interactive and useable than BotW ever did, and the increased focus on story outside of flashbacks gave the game more ways to guide the player without holding their hand, and managed some pretty fun payoffs toward the end. Depths were a really cool surprise. The things people have been engineering with ultrahand are hilarious. And the systemic interactions of materials and elements are just as compelling as they were in BotW.
Because no game is perfect, there are still issues here and there. Start with with the dungeons. The start seemed promising, with the Wind Temple setting a high standard for visual appeal and spectacle and the Fire Temple asking for a decent amount of map use and lateral thinking if you choose not to cheese it with a flying machine, but the others just don't deliver. The Lightning Temple seemed like it was going to up the ante through sheer number of floors but the central shaft made it super easy to navigate.
There's a lot of clunkiness in the menus, in activating the sages' powers, in the sheer time it takes to do things like upgrading clothes and batteries and item slots. Just finishing a shrine alone you have the animation of Link activating the terminal (unskippable), the animation of the Rauru altar thing opening up (skippable), the item get window for the blessing fading in (unskippable) and a final outro from Rauru (skippable). It's ridiculous. Just make the whole thing skippable!
And I'm just going to say it, the economy is pretty bad and the dupe glitch made it better. Being too short on rupees to afford a full armour set and having to weigh up what bits you can mix and match with clothes you already own and food you know how to cook to get resistances to the level you want is a fun problem to consider in the earlygame, but it's an issue when you never naturally get rich enough to go back and full equip yourself, let alone pay the exorbitant cost of the Great Fairies' upgrades. I rarely saw a sidequest award more than 100 rupees, and things that aren't gems sell for a pittance (presumably to encourage you to keep them on hand for fusions). It's just not setup in a way that feels accessible if you're not a hardcore, grind-ready completionist.
But all these little annoyances don't add up enough to overtake the joy of exploration and discovery. If it seems like I spent more time writing on them it's because they're all spoiler-free and the highlights I would gush about are things best discovered in the course of playing.
For the past three and a half weeks nearly all of my other hobbies have dissolved in the face of this stupid game. There's one or two more sidequests I might chase down before I call it a day, but I tried to get most of what seemed interesting done before I went to the final boss. Time well spent in another high benchmark for the series.
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Also big endgame spoilers under the cut, but did anyone else get reminded of a certain One Piece scene by this particular moment?
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@Captain-M yep i did except this game did it better its so spectacular that it actually felt like
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Other flaw that can be annoying is the menu system/UI/UX that is mostly unchanged. Item selection can take a while even with sorting. Exploring the depths for armor is fun but I do wish more, like way more, of them were tied into significant side quests. The low rupee reward is a valid point and past a certain point, there also isn't any incentive to really do combat (because the reward from the drops aren't as good as what you have to give to take down the mobs). I do get that it is fun that "anything works and you can get creative" but I also do feel bad for the developers who spent hours into a puzzle only to have it cheesed so I do wish they at least restrict the rocket/shield setup.
At it's core, Zelda do have some RPG elements and there were always some grinding but I wish shops sell more items because it is a pain to backtrack and gather x amount of fire/ice/electric fruits because you ran out of them. I wish there was a farm system for that. It's fine with arrows (even then, to buy a sustainable amount without grinding you have to teleport to like 4-5 villages after every blood moon) but for elemental drops, it can get lacking if you use them frequently.
There's also this thematic feel to be on horseback because of all the stables but boy is the horse handling still the same. Which is not to say that it is bad but it gets really tiresome and annoying especially when you have like a bunch of gadgets to autobuild from. The horses are given thematic importance but not gameplay wise because with so many mountainous regions and terrains, people are not going to ride horses up them not because they don't want to but because it gets annoying as hell. This wasn't fixed from BoTW.
There's a lot of whining and feedback about how the story is generic and weak from people who couldn't be bothered to do the tears and especially streamers who go in and cash in on the Ultrahand/gameplay aspect just to churn out a quick review + playthrough. I can't exactly blame them for that, for not completing the story and getting the true ending because the design is somewhat flawed. I do wish the story unravelled the same way you complete the temples, ironically in a more standard JRPG way. On the other hand, you can pretty much do all the geoglyphs before any of the temple and then forget about the plot. Not a good thing either.
And finally, despite the sky island being front and center of the trailer/promotional videos, they ultimately feel rather similar to one another. There's like 2-3 types of pattern of sky isles going in. I get how it will mess up the looks/aesthetics/feel of the game if there's way too much (which they addressed that they had to cut it out) but even then, for something new and novel, the shrines/depths has still more variety in terms of mobs/puzzles/challenges/layouts. What could circumvent this would be the inclusion of Sky towers/temples/pillars or any buildings that can be explored and have an interior that rewards you for discovering it and is an entire exploration puzzle inside. It is still very fun to explore the skies, don't get me wrong. But the depths were more intriguing for me but suffers from being dark,murky and tunneling which is a contrast from what Botw generally felt like when exploring. I know the ladyrinths exist but it just isn't the same because it was only a slight improvement to the Botw ones (just that now you are in sky)
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I was thinking more about it while I was lying in bed last night and I think the game does a good job with the player's offencive scaling and encouraging them to experiment, but falls short on doing the same thing for defence.
Weapon degredation to incentivise trying new things obviously goes back to BotW, but TotK makes it a lot more manageable by having the bulk of power and elemental effects come from the stockpilable materials instead of the base weapon. No longer do you have to worry about making the trip all the way out to the marked Great Flameblade location on your map after the blood moon to restock because enemies don't drop anything on its level.
I had a great experience with this - when a blue enemy goes down for the first time, its horn makes a strong enough tool to shred lower-level foes and conquer several more on its level, particularly if you're spacing weapon use out with arrow headshots and elemental bonuses. You gain more material than you lose pursuing random camps and caves, or at least break even. And the timing was good that I could enjoy dominating with a blue horn weapon just long enough before it started spawning challenging black foes, and then the cycle scaled up for them as my stash of their horns started growing.
(By the time silver mobs were common I was kinda past raiding random camps and had also discovered duplication so I didn't test them the same way. But I assume the logic tracks.)
Aside from a little residual fear of using rarer hinox or lynel materials on common mobs that wouldn't immediately replace them, it feels like a system working as intended, giving the player numbers that grow with them, allowing a small power trip and then a new challenge. And you have enough of at least the bokoblin and moblin stuff to try them out on different base weapons and work out what makes an optimal spear, what's a better sword, ect. Offence feels good here. I got to try a lot of things and never felt starved of anything.
Defence feels the exact opposite of all of that.
Shields aren't bad, but the fusion system lets them down. The most useful things to put on them - bombs, puffshrooms and muddlebuds - are all single use with no easy way to reapply mid-battle, and can be more conveniently and safely deployed on the end of an arrow. Rockets fizzling out after one launch I get, but why the heck is there only one shield surf bounce in a zonai spring? Aside from slippery things for surfing, I didn't fuse a ton of things to my shields.
But where shields just feel like a missed opportunity, your armour fights against you at every turn. If you haven't started upgrading by the time silver enemies show up you can easily seeing a third of your hearts or more disappear to a single hit, depending on health investment. And these upgrades don't just happen naturally. Waking each Great Fairy is its own sidequest, for which you'll have had to first find a musician and done their sidequest, and which you can only start after finding Penn's sidequest. And then you still have to actually buy the upgrades.
In normal gameplay, with no duplications or other exploits or grinding, you're probably going to end up with one, maybe two sets that you can boost up to level two, with maybe an individual part of each that hits level three. And you're not going to change them out much because there's no quick select and no equipping a full set at once. Let alone trying on something new you find in a cave toward the endgame, not when it starts out with a defence value of 3 - 5 and enemy damage values are now more than ten times that.
Weapons and arrows? Experimental and rewarding, trying new combinations of bits constantly, naturally upgrades over the course of gameplay. Shields? Less room to experiment, but chests and enemy drops naturally reward better base ones over time even without fusing so you just stop worrying about them. Armour? Falls right behind everything else quickly, upgrades are out of the way, expensive, and do not happen at all unless you choose to pursue them, the need to upgrade new things before use forces a reliance on earlygame staples.
Definitely not an experience-ruiner (can't stress enough that I had a fantastic time) but it's something I hope Nintendo is able to go back to the drawing board on for their next crack at a BotW/TotK style Zelda.
Maybe try a smaller number of base outfits that could be augmented with materials for elemental resistances, utilities, mix max defence or attack buffs, or so on. Just something to make the clothing feel at home with all these other systems.
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The game is amazing and a miracle of programming but I... kind of hate the core mechanic?
I'm glad everyone else is having fun fusing together insane inventions and letting their creativity run wild... but I miss the games where you get a powerup, use it to clear that dungeon, and then carry it the rest of the game. The complete overworld freedom makes that impossible I know, and judging by the sales they're never going to go back but...
Oh well, Elden Ring scratch a lot of that itch. And indie games as still doing 2D metroidvanias prettty regularly.
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Well, we still may get the cutesy throwback games.
Who knows? Maybe a remake of Oracle of Ages/Seasons is down the line.
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My feelings are somewhere near this. I enjoy the game and have had fun in the world, but I think I enjoy the sense of progression that the more classic Zeldas had. Moreover, I don't think they ever quite made a game that perfected the formula. I know many will say OOT, but I think they had the potential to do better, without gimmicks, and without being too grimdark. I hope that someday they return to the style.
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Call me when we have a new Zelda game where our weapons don’t break and we can swim underwater.
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^ That's called Majora's Mask.
I think it's all right if they take the Mario route and iterate on the classic style or remakes alongside releasing these BOTW/TOTK styled ones.
I'm still having a blast with Tears, maybe around 100 shrines done the last time I checked. I have some minor thoughts of what I would've preferred here and there, but it doesn't bother me enough to demotivate me, because I still want to do a heck more ton of stuff before I dive into another game.
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I just "finished" the game (beat the main boss). Jesus, what an experience. I had so much fun, i'm not really hardcore gamer (always been a huge Zelda fan tho', I've played almost every one) so take this with grain of salt but for my money? Best game I've played. I just love this world, characters and story so much. And I love how nonsensical the lore is and I hope Nintendo keeps it that way. It's fun to come up with weird theories how everything fits together.
My next plan is to build some rad car and go full mad max on the desert
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Knowing the Zelda team, they'll keep the open world mechanic but slowly transition into something else. Similar to what they did with Majora mask by introducing a new mechanic and going all in on it. Zelda games has historically never been just that one thing and each game tried something new. Now, the sales number might make that very, very risky to do but there's also the fact that a BoTW 3 will be pushing it because of, well, if you've played the game you'll get it. It's nothing to do about the plot but
gameplay wise, and map wise, and everything wise, I feel like this is a good spot to end.
Nintendo do trust the team a lot and I do think that while the open world remains, they will pull something new for the next installment. Maybe not in the "go back into the traditional" sense but likely a mechanic we will either a)never see coming b)exist but we just didn't experience Zelda's team take on it yet. The open world still exist in the sense that the feeling of exploration and wideness is still there but takes a second place to whatever new thing they come up with.
They kind-of did this with Ultrahand but it's not a Twilight Princess/Wind Waker/Majora level of switching things up. -
@Cinder said in The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom:
^ That's called Majora's Mask.
I said NEW
And also one that I can take a break from for a few ye-er-mon-er days and not be confused as to what I need to do, and can do at various points in the game.
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Beat the game with all main story stuff completed and done with the game for the foreseeable future. Need time to mull over my thoughts to post more specific opinions, but overall it can be summed up as a solid game that improves certain aspects from BOTW. There are also some downgrades but overall, I enjoyed it more than BOTW, however with my specific tastes I don't love the game and see it as the GOAT like many others do.
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This post is deleted!
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I beat Tears today. Man such a good game I thoroughly enjoyed it.
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@Time-Control-Magician you know you are describing botw and totk right. Honestly the weapon break gang tends to oversell how bad it is considering I end the game with still a variety of strong weapons. You just have to learn basic inventory management. Swimming underwater and having a underwater world as big as the depths? That I can get behind
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Ultimately, any criticisms or misgivings I have are ultimately not enough to really bring the game down itself. For an open world game it's the best I can hope for, but those kinds of games just don't resonate with me to become one of my favorites. That said, it's clear as day with both games that there was a clear vision that they executed to a great degree, and the quality of what they made is unquestionable. These are both games that over time I will replay and have fun with as each playthrough is its own experience, and having something to just sit back and enjoy is a good thing.
As for the weapon durability, I never really had a problem with it for either game. There was only a few times it was annoying in TOTK, but less the durability and more the fusing mechanic being harder to use properly when doing horde type battles. A lot of times trying to run by to fuse the exact item you want is hard when you have dozens of consumables laying around and enemies chasing you as the same time.
I'm done with the game for now, but I look forward to a replay in the future when I feel like doing one.
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@zeltrax225 said in The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom:
@Time-Control-Magician you know you are describing botw and totk right
Yes hence (again) why I said “call me when a new Zelda games steps away from those two gameplay issues I mentioned”. I have played OoT, Windwaker, MM, & LTTP which lacked one or both those problems in addition to BOTW which had both.
I liked BOTW but it had some niche elements I didn’t particularly care for.
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What I disliked about BotW and TotK, is that the Champions/Sage weapons are breakable as well. They should have gotten a similar mechanic to the master sword. Besides that TotK seems to have fixed that at least to some extent with the Poe Statue.
Not sure when I am going to face Ganon, as I want to complete more of the side quests and get some more armour sets before facing him.
Overall the early game of TotK was a pain, at least when I compare it to BotW. The enemies felt stronger, but once I got back into dodging/Flurry rush and perfect blocking the game was more enjoyable.
As I am a hoarder in Video games, its fun to collect all the different materials, but actually using them is really difficult for me.
But TotK forces you to use them, so that good for me.Negatives about the game don't come to mind, besides the enemies feeling to strong at the start of the game.
I also got back into Twitch and started watching speedruns again, I wonder when those glitches are patched out of the game or if at all.
I hope we get to that magical number of under 30 minutes to complete the game. -
@The-Light-of-Shandora 3 diamonds is a rip off damnit
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Okay wow, I JUST saw that I was the one that started this thread waaay back when. I can't tell you the last time I did that.
Anyways I did get autobuild, and have just been strolling around doing whatever tickles my fancy. Got 11? whole hearts and 1.5 stamina wheels, i think 60 shrines completed in total. It's really hard to put the game down lol, every day I'm doing something.
Just completed the Mattison side quest.....sublime.
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Welp, I finally beat this game. Yeah, I got really held up by sidequests.
Overall, while I can't say this game and its limited weapons/materials/etc. are great for my anxiety or completionist itch, it's still a damn good time, even if it is basically just BOTW revamped. That's still kind of my biggest that I just wish they'd done more to differentiate the two.
Still gonna be playing it for a little while to do more sidequests and attempt to get all the armor.