I really wonder if there's a cohesive way to combine older Zelda progression and dungeons, with a more fluid and open design; they seem so antithetical that I'm really curious how it could be done.
Dungeons are the single best thing that video games as a concept can do and the existence of games with dungeons has simply been eliminated from the industry.
On of my favorites for dungeon design was a link between worlds. You could essentially do any one in whatever order and the item rental mechanic wasn’t bad either.
The best parts of TOTK were the dungeons and the shrines.
So much of exploring TOTK was incredibly boring and been there done that to me, if I was to replay those two would be the only things I'd do.
Similarly the sky islands forced you to think about how to get around too so that was also nice.
I thought TotK had some of the most disappointing dungeons in the whole series. the Water Temple was just another sky island and they didn't do anything to the overall structure of the dungeons to differentiate them from divine beasts. exact same 5 terminal bullshit
water temple was def the worst, but I actually enjoyed the others quite a bit.
Much better then BOTW's sad excuse for dungeons, the TOTK ones had great theming, some really neat puzzles etc.
They still had the terminal layout sure, but the actual dungeon areas were more intricately built.
I really love simple block pushing puzzles and rooms where you just have to kill all the enemies to get the key, those moments always introduced new enemies whenever that was in the design so killing new foes you don't recognize is the puzzle itself
hate how even more puzzle focused things have gotten in recent games because people thought breaking down the logic of old Zelda would somehow alleviate their boredom. no mfer you just had to go play something else instead there was no reason to fix what was never broken
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So much of exploring TOTK was incredibly boring and been there done that to me, if I was to replay those two would be the only things I'd do.
Similarly the sky islands forced you to think about how to get around too so that was also nice.
Much better then BOTW's sad excuse for dungeons, the TOTK ones had great theming, some really neat puzzles etc.
They still had the terminal layout sure, but the actual dungeon areas were more intricately built.
It's empty. With the enemies repeating, as well as the deluge of swiss army knife items, there's no "ah ha" moments.
Not when you can easily cheese the "puzzles" or have every enemy repeat ad nauseum.