trying to wrap up TotK and god something about this game just doesn't click with me. every random goon one-shots me and i refuse to build a little car to get around so i have to walk everywhere. let me throw ganon in the toilet im done
Comments
Log in with your Bluesky account to leave a comment
You've probably already heard this, but, building one of these bad boys is a game changer.
-Never disolves
-Cost like 9 ore to make it from nothing
-It floats!
-Very low energy cost to fly
I picked up totk again recently after a year and finally made one of those. Game changer, game breaking almost! I had only just found all of the climbing gear too and it was immediately made redundant.
I wonder if there is a better flying vehicle though, ideally something faster...
I tried to double up the fans and build upon the design but unfortunately any additions completely threw the balance off.
I did find that I could attach temple stones or a korok to the underside of the steering column and drag/hover to the destination.
yeah cargo is the main concern, I have to fall back on other vehicles whenever I find a lil korok chump who lost his mate. I only have 140 left to find but I will try that!
I am at a stage where I have zonaite to burn and acquiring more is trivial, so no need to be a cheapskate with parts. Just want the goodest custom schematics now! I wouldn't mind double, triple the cost of a hoverbike if it got me a better vehicle.
there's like an invisible leveling system that determines drop rates and enemy tiers but the progression seems totally erratic and barely ever maintains balance. they should just open it up and make a simplified elden ring if that's what they want so bad
i liked botw but part of my problem with that game as well as this one is there are so many enticing-looking things on the map and when you find them 90% of the time the reward is like, a disposable crafting item
Very much this, something about the way they designed botw made me feel an existential dread of a dying world. They obviously didn't mean it that way with all the NPCs, bright colors etc, but it's just *off* to me in the way a lot of soulslike games are intentionally somehow
nintendo takes this idea of multiplicative gameplay (which should be good!) to such an extreme now that they rarely implement things dedicated to like, one particular item or place
i get *why* for dev purposes, but in an open world game it feels awful to have absolutely nothing you find be unique
Botw world was a mile wide but an inch deep. It’s a problem for most open worlds. They give the illusion of limitless adventure until you realize it’s just a bunch of lightly reskinned interactions/dungeons/quest types copy pasted 1000 times over a pretty landscape
I’m playing assassins creed odyssey and the world is MASSIVE, dozens of islands and countries to explore full of cities and dungeons and ruins and points of interest. And yet once you’ve explored the first island you’ve basically seen all the game actually has to offer
I can see that. But, for me, it was enough. I liked exploring as much for the emergent story telling as the trinkets.
I feel like they made the world just real and lived-in enough that you’d at least entertain the question “what happened to put that labyrint out here in the desert?”
Yeah the building was over hyped crap for the Minecraft generation. The puzzles that require building something all sucked, I made the quickest thing that would passably complete the task and ultimately had to spend more time revising my design. Just give me a damn plane that works.
The building didn’t win me over either, even Aonuma wasn’t sure and had to be convinced to lean in on it. That for me says he just doesn’t get it, same as me. I stopped playing after 8-10 hours and haven’t gone back yet. First time I haven’t stuck with a Zelda game. Maybe not for elder millennials
I stuck with it through to the finish, ~130 hours. It isn't terrible but I actually thought it was worse than Breath of the Wild for the additions. A few times it is exhilarating to descend from the sky to a lower level but it becomes dull and repetitive fairly quickly.
And in classic expendable item fashion, I didn't use any of the high powered weapon upgrades the entire game because I wasn't sure when I would need them, so I wiped the floor with Ganon once I started using those. I didn't use the master sword one time because I didn't know if it broke or not.
Despite its size, it’s sort of DLC-ish and sometimes a bit tedious. I enjoyed it and finished it, and there are a shitload of games I don’t finish, but BotW did it better.
Personally I prefer 🗡️BotW🍃 over 💧TotK👑. There was something about the exploration and mystery of what's behind that corner (Korok), or what's under that bridge (Korok) or what's in that tree (Korok) that was really so fascinating.
It was more revolutionary. The real exciting stuff like the combat, physics engine, the beautiful world was all new at the time. TotK is a rehash so lacks the capacity to jolt the senses the same way again. I think of them as one game, pretty much.
Say what you will about 💧TotK👑 , but it's actually a technical marvel that game runs as well as it does in the 🟥Switch🟦, a system that amounts to, what is essentially, an 8 year old smart toaster.
Agree wholeheartedly there. Aside from the occasional pausing when your horse or vehicle is to OP for the loading areas or busier areas with lots of assets, both games look, play and feel wonderful to me, on a flippin' handheld...
I can’t finish totk. I got baited into it because I loved botw because I like its chill ambience and world but totk just wants me to build jankmobiles and hit things with goofy janksticks and I just don’t want to do that at all
You really *need* to upgrade your armor a few times to keep pace with the monster difficulty but the great fairies are pretty missable and some of the armor sets need quite a bit of grinding for materials at the higher end
it didn't click with me until i figured out the item combinations for strong weapons. slap an animal part on a sword, eyeballs on arrows, and suddenly you can mow through whatever
You can really shotgun most of the endgame if you nab the master sword and enough fodder weapons to get you through the last story act. Couldnt be bothered to make anything but the flying shit bike the whole game, felt too much like a chore and not enough like an adventure. Sad :^(
Okay but then you miss things! I hate that I’m so slow walking, but horses can’t explore all the terrain I’m curious about. Every time I get a horse and say I’m going to use it, I then get distracted and then I’m 3 mountain peaks away, at an entrance to the depths, horse completely forgotten.
Yeah its true.
When I'm in "I need to go there and do that" mode I'll use a horse, but if I'm entertaining some shenanigans then I'll probably do it on foot and take my time
At some point I realized that stunning creatures by hitting them in the face with the bow was just incredibly overpowered and way more consistent then parrying. Killed so many Lynels like that
never left the starting place in TotK wish i could refund it. don't want to build stupid shit with a controller. i played BotW on WiiU and the gamepad was awesome. the unrepairable weapons were not.
I think my issue with it is that it has such a cluttered vibe that it loses the isolated calm of BOTW, but also doesn’t actually supplement that gameplay wise and expects you do dodge and hop in the same solo battles and also manage the billion new systems while also having a billion enemies at once
Like I found my grove eventually and can do things pretty easily in it, but it just doesn’t feel nearly as satisfying as driving around on the Master Cycle aimlessly finding moblins to fight on my 100%ed BOTW file
I enjoyed it a lot but lemme tell you the game kind of does itself no favors when you're allowed to roll up to the last bits with an army of kill-bots.
Shrines are either 2-min detours or irritating enough to skip. I’m talking about the immersive, high-stakes dungeons of the old style games. Nothing in BOTW/TOTK really equals that. Once you learn the map, meet a few people… meh. EOW was good at mixing “life in Hyrule” with decent cinematic stakes
Yeah, TOTK was an improvement over BOTW regarding dungeons, but only just— the Lightning and Fire Temples felt closer to classic dungeons, the other two felt like shrines jammed together.
Sparce story? Like botw I can kinda get that sure but totk has easily the densest large world of any game I've ever played. If the game's not for you it's not for you but I find this an odd criticism especially since more story filled locations are readily given to you
You can upgrade your armor and heart vessels to not get oneshot. Don't complain about walking everywhere when you refuse to use one of the main features in the game
Let me be clear: if you are being one-shot killed by random overworld enemies and, on top of refusing to engage with the building mechanic, won't fast travel or tame a horse, you literally have not learned to play the game, and "not clicking" is not the root of your problems enjoying it
constructing goofy killer gizmos or plow trucks is not at all mandatory for general combat. you can more than get by just taking advantage of arrow/weapon fusing, upgrading armor, and stocking up buffing meals. the game does have wonky balance but there's at least plenty of options
right? there's simply no way the random enemies outside of Gloomspawn can stomp you that bad unless you're straight up not upgrading your clothes or fusing your equipment
I hated fumbling around in the dark underground and so I barely had any batteries and couldn’t build anything cool that would work for more than a few seconds, meanwhile every video of it is people building Gundams or space stations or something.
I played it near launch when there were glitches that let me dupe any sort of item and I think that aided my enjoyment SO much; even at the time I felt a lot of it would've been a slog if I didn't have infinite rupees/upgrade materials/building materials
continuing to play this when it doesn’t hit is honestly both heroic and foolish of you.
and i LOVED totk. i would replay it from the starting screen TOMORROW. i would photograph every mushroom and @ nintendo to thank them for the privilege. u don’t need to do this!!
if you can get to ganon, i don’t even remember the series of events for this, just go. it’s a zelda. he’s going to be so easy to beat that literal children do it every day. and the final fight actually IS cute. it has like 2 laugh-out-loud moments
it felt to me like the game assumes your ghost squad is with you all the time, and also you've spent a lot of time upgrading your gear - i found it a lot more frustrating than BOTW
When you do consent to building little vehicles, it isn't less tedious. Fiddle around with legos for 2 minutes and they fall apart in less time than it took to build them.
Personally ny issue was how difficult it is to get the resources to make that lil car, have it drive for more than 30 seconds, and get a steering wheel.
I respected the idea of a remix world, but location discovery was the my main motivator in BOtW not the interacting systems/tools, so I struggled a bit too.
also hilarious how they used the same "find the plot in random places on the map" thing as botw but made it waaaaay easier to stumble on said plot entirely out of order.
also the same cutscene like four times in the temples, ugh
Zelda is my favorite video game franchise of all time. I really did not care for either of the switch games. That being said, I am thrilled that millions of others do. Zelda has always been a franchise that evolves. It’s not my cup of tea, but I’m sure another one will come out that I love.
ultimately what BotW truly excelled at was how fantastic exploration felt so TotK reusing the exact same world map with some minor tweaks + (1 a fairly small and copy pasty sky map and 2) an enormous but painfully shitty underground map really didn't sing for me. burned me out in a way BotW did not
My mistake was playing thru botw again in the leadup to totk's release. Got burned out after a couple of months and shelved it for a year. Finally went back and having a good time! They are 80% the same game though.
Horses are also very easy to catch in TotK and you can register and summon them from any stable and you can just gallop past everything toward the main objectives if you don't want to engage with stuff. They require basically no maintenance and will follow roads automatically once they are tamed.
TotK is obviously a massive game with a lot of interconnected systems and I can see how it would be exhausting If you don't buy into all that and don't want to spend 100 or 200 hours invested in the game. If you're determined to get through it with as little friction as possible I would recommend
buying the Hylian armor set from Lookout Landing and doing the quests to find the four Great Fairies so you can upgrade the set. It's not the best armor in the game but you can upgrade it very easily with common monster parts. That should carry you through the main quest without much trouble.
The phantom set is pretty good until you start seeing more black and silver enemies. It can't be upgraded so each piece only gives 8 defense, while the Hylian set gives 4/8/16/20 defense per piece depending on the upgrade level. The extra 36 defense is well worth sacrificing the set bonus IMO.
By the time you start seeing silver enemies you'll need weapons that can pack a punch but luckily the parts they drop are perfect for fusing to your weapons. The orange colored sturdy sticks and thick sticks and long sticks are good bases for fusion and are very commonly carried by surface enemies.
The whole thing about these two games is how zen they are. In some respect, as soon as you begin playing them, they are already complete. It is nearly all icing and very little cake - all of the main quest stuff feels somewhat besides the point, they are sandboxes.
TotK is frustrating to me, because it really SHOULD be an improved version of BotW, but it isn't. The design philosophy took two steps forward and two steps back, ending up right back where it started. It's a disappointing sidegrade, and most of what I wanted from it was done by Echoes of Wisdom.
When you can fight bosses in any order and go anywhere it kinda usually doesn't feel like a cohesive narrative that keeps you going and more a pretty frame to hang the game up in. I totally get it. I prefer the NES and N64 ones what can I say. Skyward sword was great but i only played it once
Wait this is so reassuring because i feel exactly the same way about TotK. It’s too similar to botw, but in the worst ways. I thought I was just a bad gamer who didn’t “get” it. 😭
i mean yeah if you refuse to engage with arguably the game’s core mechanic then of course it’s not gonna click with you. the world is built around constructing little doohickeys so to dismiss that part of the game and just playing it like botw is doing it and yourself a disservice imo
which is fair, i was definitely stubborn about the building system at first too but once i caved and looked up some doohickeys online, it really clicked with me and became my favorite part of the game
i’m grateful i didn’t find out about the hover bike until i was nearly done with the game anyway, because if i had known about it earlier it definitely would’ve dampened my desire to experiment with builds
i did say *arguably* tbf. and i would argue that while, sure, you CAN walk around the entire map without too much of an issue, nintendo clearly intended for building and using contraptions to be a large part of how you interact with the world
While trying to give as little spoilers as possible, I think if they wanted to do that then would have completely redesigned the final boss fight. They did not incorporate that at all into it
if they had done so, that would’ve forced players into a certain playstyle, which is not what nintendo wanted to do. heavily nudge players to engage with the new systems? sure, but they wanted to leave open the possibility that some players would rather just walk and slice their way through the game
Comments
-Never disolves
-Cost like 9 ore to make it from nothing
-It floats!
-Very low energy cost to fly
I wonder if there is a better flying vehicle though, ideally something faster...
I did find that I could attach temple stones or a korok to the underside of the steering column and drag/hover to the destination.
Near the end of my playthrough I was mercing gleeoks left and right
Have you upgraded your armour?
i get *why* for dev purposes, but in an open world game it feels awful to have absolutely nothing you find be unique
yeah, you can totally climb up that mountain in the distance, but the tedious act of climbing up the mountain doesn't give you anything worthwhile
"What if I want to climb while it's raining?"
"That's the game telling you to go do something else"
Fuck you!
"that's the game's way of saying to try out new weapons!"
"but ALL the weapons suck"
I feel like they made the world just real and lived-in enough that you’d at least entertain the question “what happened to put that labyrint out here in the desert?”
They are both fundamentally the same experience anyway. Good same imho. One day I hope homebrew geniuses are able to stitch them together somehow.
Did you also not try to get good armor, upgrade it, and get heart containers with the Lights of Blessing? Genuinely asking.
I've been much more a fan of the chibi Zelda games on Switch, perfect chill/ on the go types with the odd brain teaser thrown in.
When I'm in "I need to go there and do that" mode I'll use a horse, but if I'm entertaining some shenanigans then I'll probably do it on foot and take my time
Any game with the word “parry” in its description or control map is probably not a good idea for me.
Not a fan of empty open world games with sparce story.
Totk has such a lively detailed world with such a diversity of people, narriative, structures and systems it seems like magic it finished developmemt
and i LOVED totk. i would replay it from the starting screen TOMORROW. i would photograph every mushroom and @ nintendo to thank them for the privilege. u don’t need to do this!!
also the same cutscene like four times in the temples, ugh
considering finally finishing my run-through of totk
Echoes of Wisdom !
I think my sleep deprivation shows 🥲
Good night 🤟
“YIURE REFUSING TO ENGAGE WITH THE CORR MECHSNIC”