Before I start this review I need to preface that this game is an extremely good game there's no reason to deny the sheer quality and scope of such a project.
With that said, was it a completely satisfying game to me ? A long time Zelda fan who also happened to have the original BOTW ranked super highly as one of my favorite game of all time ?
Heeeeh not quite
By the time I'm writing this review I have completed every single shrine, gotten every single light roots, gotten every single bubul frog crystals, done a couple of the most important mission, got all the dragon tears and ofc finished the 5 temples as well as defeating the evil Ganondorf.
So I'm confident in saying that while all of this was still a relatively fun and addicting experience, there's a lingering feeling at the back of my head telling me that this wasn't really that great of a sequel to BOTW
But why ? Why did I have this awkward feeling ?
I guess it's because BOTW was such a unique experience on release, one that could be difficult to top even with the best of effort, it's such a unique take on Zelda going back to its roots and giving the series the proper evolution it needed after years of stagnant attempt at recapturing the magic of OOT with more or less good success.
It was an ode to freedom, to adventure, it was a game that had the balls to throw away 20 years of Zelda convention and was making no compromise to deliver the best experience possible.
It's hard to deny how much of an amazing title BOTW was when the only people complaining about it are game design illiterate Zelda fans who thought it wasn't "Zelda enough" (which in my book was a good thing) and personally speaking it was hard to recapture a similar experience.
TOTK feels more like what happens when you're bored of playing Minecraft Vanilla and you want to spice things up with some mods to add more stuff to do and that's how I feel about most of the new features in this game, nothing that truly enhances the original game experience in any significant way but just add more stuff on top of what was already a pretty meaty game.
But in doing so, I don't feel that the new stuff was thought with the same minutia or the same sense of vision that BOTW did.
I start with the big elephant in the room which is the map of the game.
As you may know, the map of TOTK is mostly lifted off of the one from BOTW, the surface world isn't entirely devoid of new stuff but it's still relatively the same world just slightly touched up.
The problem with this is that it completely change the way you experience the world, in BOTW I was discovering the world, I was letting myself go loose and absorb the entirety of the game in all of its scope, in TOTK the exploration feels a bit more processed.
I know these plains, I've climbed these mountains, I've sailed those seas, I've been there so I don't approach the world of TOTK the same way I did the one in BOTW.
BOTW felt like actually exploring a world and creating your own adventure, TOTK feels like checking a list of stuff to revisit to see what's different as well as progressing through the very disjointed story of the game (more on that later).
But TOTK has 2 more layers to its map, the sky and the depths !
These were the main selling point of the game (especially the sky) and the two biggest addition to BOTW's world and what do I think of both of them ?
They're honestly not that amazing, there are very few sky islands and most of them outside of the starting area are just the same copy pasted layout of one island with a rotating platform, a distributor and an empty shrine you have to bring a crystal to either by going to an island with an underground where it lies or going to an island where the same cube boss guards it on its back.
There's only maybe 2 or 3 sky island that are actually different and offer a different set of challenges and going to them is kind of bothersome with no proper way to traverse the sky (unless you decide to create an airbike), at some point the sky islands were becoming a bit too predictable but at least they were better than...
The Depths...
So ok, when I first entered the depths my jaw dropped to the floor, these crazy mf made an entire map under the map ???
But then you actually explore the depth and realize its depressingly void of interest, it's the same biomes and structure repeated infinitely with little to nothing of value to be found in here and the only real appeal of it is making surface shrines easier to find (due to the map being symetrical) and grinding for Zonite Ore to upgrade your battery (and I guess that neat little quest with the Yiga Clan but even that got dull pretty fast), every trip down here ended in disappointment and felt like a massive waste of my time until I decided to make an air bike to skip on most of the cumbersome traversal (because god the geography of the depth coupled with the limited light sources just makes me loose my mind)
The best addition to the world at least to me are the caves and wells, these should've been more advertised because these are awesome ! They're the kind of places that feels like it actually belonged in the original game map, they have unique and interesting layouts and they hold lots of surprises within them without feeling too samey and I wish the Sky Islands and The depths were designed with the same philosophy as them.
Another problem arise when discussing the story of the game. See BOTW structure really doesn't mesh well with a more narratively driven story and it shows, you can feel that there was an intended order in how you're supposed to experience what the game has to offer but if you played BOTW before, you don't wanna do that, you just want to explore the world and do things in whatever order you want !
But TOTK encourages to qualm your drive to explore and go on an adventure because not doing so will lead to a worst narrative experience, sometimes you get cutscenes out of order, you experience story segment out of order and the whole story gets broken because the first memory you get is of Zelda traveling to time and the second could be Ganon transforming into a demon and there's like 15 different step you just skipped.
It's sad because it makes some of the stronger more controlled moment of the story less effective as a result
In conclusion TOTK is a game that I enjoyed but it lacks the cohesiveness of the original game even if its fun to play around with the new ability
With that said, was it a completely satisfying game to me ? A long time Zelda fan who also happened to have the original BOTW ranked super highly as one of my favorite game of all time ?
Heeeeh not quite
By the time I'm writing this review I have completed every single shrine, gotten every single light roots, gotten every single bubul frog crystals, done a couple of the most important mission, got all the dragon tears and ofc finished the 5 temples as well as defeating the evil Ganondorf.
So I'm confident in saying that while all of this was still a relatively fun and addicting experience, there's a lingering feeling at the back of my head telling me that this wasn't really that great of a sequel to BOTW
But why ? Why did I have this awkward feeling ?
I guess it's because BOTW was such a unique experience on release, one that could be difficult to top even with the best of effort, it's such a unique take on Zelda going back to its roots and giving the series the proper evolution it needed after years of stagnant attempt at recapturing the magic of OOT with more or less good success.
It was an ode to freedom, to adventure, it was a game that had the balls to throw away 20 years of Zelda convention and was making no compromise to deliver the best experience possible.
It's hard to deny how much of an amazing title BOTW was when the only people complaining about it are game design illiterate Zelda fans who thought it wasn't "Zelda enough" (which in my book was a good thing) and personally speaking it was hard to recapture a similar experience.
TOTK feels more like what happens when you're bored of playing Minecraft Vanilla and you want to spice things up with some mods to add more stuff to do and that's how I feel about most of the new features in this game, nothing that truly enhances the original game experience in any significant way but just add more stuff on top of what was already a pretty meaty game.
But in doing so, I don't feel that the new stuff was thought with the same minutia or the same sense of vision that BOTW did.
I start with the big elephant in the room which is the map of the game.
As you may know, the map of TOTK is mostly lifted off of the one from BOTW, the surface world isn't entirely devoid of new stuff but it's still relatively the same world just slightly touched up.
The problem with this is that it completely change the way you experience the world, in BOTW I was discovering the world, I was letting myself go loose and absorb the entirety of the game in all of its scope, in TOTK the exploration feels a bit more processed.
I know these plains, I've climbed these mountains, I've sailed those seas, I've been there so I don't approach the world of TOTK the same way I did the one in BOTW.
BOTW felt like actually exploring a world and creating your own adventure, TOTK feels like checking a list of stuff to revisit to see what's different as well as progressing through the very disjointed story of the game (more on that later).
But TOTK has 2 more layers to its map, the sky and the depths !
These were the main selling point of the game (especially the sky) and the two biggest addition to BOTW's world and what do I think of both of them ?
They're honestly not that amazing, there are very few sky islands and most of them outside of the starting area are just the same copy pasted layout of one island with a rotating platform, a distributor and an empty shrine you have to bring a crystal to either by going to an island with an underground where it lies or going to an island where the same cube boss guards it on its back.
There's only maybe 2 or 3 sky island that are actually different and offer a different set of challenges and going to them is kind of bothersome with no proper way to traverse the sky (unless you decide to create an airbike), at some point the sky islands were becoming a bit too predictable but at least they were better than...
The Depths...
So ok, when I first entered the depths my jaw dropped to the floor, these crazy mf made an entire map under the map ???
But then you actually explore the depth and realize its depressingly void of interest, it's the same biomes and structure repeated infinitely with little to nothing of value to be found in here and the only real appeal of it is making surface shrines easier to find (due to the map being symetrical) and grinding for Zonite Ore to upgrade your battery (and I guess that neat little quest with the Yiga Clan but even that got dull pretty fast), every trip down here ended in disappointment and felt like a massive waste of my time until I decided to make an air bike to skip on most of the cumbersome traversal (because god the geography of the depth coupled with the limited light sources just makes me loose my mind)
The best addition to the world at least to me are the caves and wells, these should've been more advertised because these are awesome ! They're the kind of places that feels like it actually belonged in the original game map, they have unique and interesting layouts and they hold lots of surprises within them without feeling too samey and I wish the Sky Islands and The depths were designed with the same philosophy as them.
Another problem arise when discussing the story of the game. See BOTW structure really doesn't mesh well with a more narratively driven story and it shows, you can feel that there was an intended order in how you're supposed to experience what the game has to offer but if you played BOTW before, you don't wanna do that, you just want to explore the world and do things in whatever order you want !
But TOTK encourages to qualm your drive to explore and go on an adventure because not doing so will lead to a worst narrative experience, sometimes you get cutscenes out of order, you experience story segment out of order and the whole story gets broken because the first memory you get is of Zelda traveling to time and the second could be Ganon transforming into a demon and there's like 15 different step you just skipped.
It's sad because it makes some of the stronger more controlled moment of the story less effective as a result
In conclusion TOTK is a game that I enjoyed but it lacks the cohesiveness of the original game even if its fun to play around with the new ability
4 Comments
this review also captures my thoughts so well. wtf are u in my head
This comment was deleted
idk the owrld in botw was the only thing selling it. once the initial hook is gone, you are left hunting for the same boring as fuck samey shrines or god forbid koroks
this game using the inital foundation but making it gmod was enough to fix it for me, and combined with actual dungeons and depths... I don't think I'm touching botw ever again
this game using the inital foundation but making it gmod was enough to fix it for me, and combined with actual dungeons and depths... I don't think I'm touching botw ever again
I still haven't written a review of TotK just yet but most of this just echoes how I feel about the game anyway so I'm honestly wondering if I even need to. I might write out some more detailed thoughts at some point, but I feel like I would definitely enjoy this game more if I hadn't played BotW first, weird as that sounds. It's like a game I can acknowledge is functionally better than BotW in a lot of ways, but doesn't give me the same sense of amazement that BotW ever did.
2cflame
11 months ago