DeviousJinjo
Hmm... a generally positive time, but a mixed bag. I started with this one because it's technically a prequel to Armored Core 1, and that was silly. It was fine, but it was silly.
Controls are... crusty. To say the least. Even for PS1. I was able to adapt given a few hours, but even once firing while boost-strafing in circles starts to feel "normal" it never feels smooth. Interacting with consoles and doors and such feels pretty consistently bad. This lack of fine motor control also made me prefer standard outdoor brawls to anything that involved going into a confined space. Missions in general are hit and miss. Some feel very slapdash.
The arena is a highlight, and it's great, both as fairly interesting content and as a way for a player to "grind" and power up their builds in order to get through the next mission. Looking forward to more.
Controls are... crusty. To say the least. Even for PS1. I was able to adapt given a few hours, but even once firing while boost-strafing in circles starts to feel "normal" it never feels smooth. Interacting with consoles and doors and such feels pretty consistently bad. This lack of fine motor control also made me prefer standard outdoor brawls to anything that involved going into a confined space. Missions in general are hit and miss. Some feel very slapdash.
The arena is a highlight, and it's great, both as fairly interesting content and as a way for a player to "grind" and power up their builds in order to get through the next mission. Looking forward to more.
1998
Baldur's Gate is, unfortunately, completely obsolete. For reasons other than sheer nostalgia or curiosity, it simply is no longer worth playing. I don't wish to be too harsh on it, as in its day it was the product of quality and purpose, but something must be said of "standing the test of time." Baldur's Gate is of a time when simply being able to play Dungeons and Dragons by oneself, on one's own schedule, with automated combat rolls and more audio-visual happenings than Orthanc or any of the other primordial D&D computerizations was an earth shifting novelty.
For a citizen from far beyond The Year Two Thousand and especially for one who has been lucky enough to actually play D&D consistently with a group that they like, Baldur's Gate is a complete and total slog. The hack and slash brand of tabletop roleplayer that it was made to service is one that has dwindled to virtually nothing, and wasn't exactly huge to begin with. Even for those who still hunt such solo simulations, there are better solutions than D&D, and there are better editions than AD&D. Most importantly, there are far, far better dungeon masters no matter your preferred system of play.
There are a great many things that a good DM will do to ensure a good experience for their group, and Baldur's Gate will do none of these. Baldur's Gate is perfectly happy to fill a dungeon with spiders that cast Web immediately, every single time they enter combat, and then make you sit there and wait until the full duration of the spell expires, even if all of the spiders have been dead for nearly a full minute. At the tabletop, any competent DM would either do something interesting with trapping the party in webs, or they would skip things ahead... because having everyone sit silently for a full minute in between encounters would be fucking annoying, and no one would like it.
It's not just that Baldur's Gate's DM is a cold robot who cares not for fun, it's that he's a pre-teen giga-nerd circa 1995. He assumes that you'll be utterly starstruck when faced with the canon-renowned Elminster: Greatest Wizard, and he thinks that you'll be on the floor in need of stitches when you first encounter his brilliant Noober. The joke is that Noober is annoying, you see. A noob, if you will. The DM will offer you endless fields of bog standard and disinteresting sidequests because he thinks that you are just as excited about the mere opportunity to play Dungeons and Dragons as he is. In its way, that's adorable. Unfortunately it renders most of the game no more than a time capsule... a window into a time where the fact that a computer could perform Dungeons and Dragons for you at all was thrilling enough. It no longer is.
Even if one conveniently ignores the bountiful pastures of subsequent CRPGs that offer more engaging narrative experiences, it is far, FAR more likely that one can now simply play D&D with actual human people. In your Baldur's Gate party, everyone simultaneously won't shut up and never says anything. In the end, from a modern perspective, Baldur's Gate feels like a bad session with a sophomoric DM and a truly lame batch of players, and that's a real shame, because the story does eventually reveal itself as something with great potential. Maybe the sequel can capitalize on it.
For a citizen from far beyond The Year Two Thousand and especially for one who has been lucky enough to actually play D&D consistently with a group that they like, Baldur's Gate is a complete and total slog. The hack and slash brand of tabletop roleplayer that it was made to service is one that has dwindled to virtually nothing, and wasn't exactly huge to begin with. Even for those who still hunt such solo simulations, there are better solutions than D&D, and there are better editions than AD&D. Most importantly, there are far, far better dungeon masters no matter your preferred system of play.
There are a great many things that a good DM will do to ensure a good experience for their group, and Baldur's Gate will do none of these. Baldur's Gate is perfectly happy to fill a dungeon with spiders that cast Web immediately, every single time they enter combat, and then make you sit there and wait until the full duration of the spell expires, even if all of the spiders have been dead for nearly a full minute. At the tabletop, any competent DM would either do something interesting with trapping the party in webs, or they would skip things ahead... because having everyone sit silently for a full minute in between encounters would be fucking annoying, and no one would like it.
It's not just that Baldur's Gate's DM is a cold robot who cares not for fun, it's that he's a pre-teen giga-nerd circa 1995. He assumes that you'll be utterly starstruck when faced with the canon-renowned Elminster: Greatest Wizard, and he thinks that you'll be on the floor in need of stitches when you first encounter his brilliant Noober. The joke is that Noober is annoying, you see. A noob, if you will. The DM will offer you endless fields of bog standard and disinteresting sidequests because he thinks that you are just as excited about the mere opportunity to play Dungeons and Dragons as he is. In its way, that's adorable. Unfortunately it renders most of the game no more than a time capsule... a window into a time where the fact that a computer could perform Dungeons and Dragons for you at all was thrilling enough. It no longer is.
Even if one conveniently ignores the bountiful pastures of subsequent CRPGs that offer more engaging narrative experiences, it is far, FAR more likely that one can now simply play D&D with actual human people. In your Baldur's Gate party, everyone simultaneously won't shut up and never says anything. In the end, from a modern perspective, Baldur's Gate feels like a bad session with a sophomoric DM and a truly lame batch of players, and that's a real shame, because the story does eventually reveal itself as something with great potential. Maybe the sequel can capitalize on it.
Tears of the Kingdom is Breath of the Wild's Master Quest. Even when viewed strictly as a sequel to Breath of the Wild rather than a whole new Zelda game, it feels more like an extremely ambitious rom hack. It is Breath of the Wild but bigger and with different tools, and that renders it a decent video game by sheer inheritance. It also frustrates and demoralizes me more than anything I have encountered this year, and this is the same year in which FFXVI set up a fantastic story and then somehow disappointed me with it at almost every turn. TotK retains BotW's beloved looseness in its puzzles, its inspiring allowances for creativity, and to my boundless surprise, almost all of its problems.
Regardless of how bright-eyed and hopeful it made us, BotW was never without some rather noticeable deficiencies. While I have always recognized the necessity and the wisdom of the fools-loathed durability system, it brought with it the pestilence of accounting. Most of the times that I opened a chest in Breath of the Wild, I was told that I didn't have enough space to accept whatever weapon or shield the game had just tried to reward me with. This buzzkill moment would then either require me to pop open a menu and choose something to drop, or to close the chest and walk away. This frequent chicanery was one of BotW's biggest flaws, and it was drastically exacerbated by the decision to repeatedly HIDE the NPC who expands the player's inventory. As much as I liked the Korok puzzles in their position as elegant curiosity reward nuggets for any players who intuitively secret-hunted in the nooks and crannies of the world, Hestu served as a bizarre, unnecessary roadblock to put between the players and their fun.
Imagine my surprise then, when instead of the exact sort of basic quality of life improvement that one might expect from a sequel, Nintendo decided to quintuple down on that inventory nightmare. Hestu thankfully stays put in a predictable location after you initially find him this time, but he and his Koroks (like Great Fairies and a rather depressing number of other things) are back in exactly the same capacity as the first game. In fact, most of the Korok puzzles are in exactly the same style. Follow the little sapling, check the rustling leaves at the top of a building, shoot the balloons, hurry to the ring, match the rock formation, match the block formation... all of these return in equal force. There are new ones too, of course, but many of these new ones are far more tedious than types imported from BotW. I have now run right past roughly 80% of the cork Koroks I've seen because I just do not find them in any way amusing. The first time I saw one of the stranded backpack Koroks, I thought it was absolutely adorable, and frankly I still do. Nonetheless, every time I see one now I have to stifle a sigh. For most of the game I just picked them up with Ultrahand to manually carry them, because the thought of building yet another vehicular contraption just for this was so exhausting that I would rather choose the hike.
When I said that TotK had different tools, I was talking about Ultrahand. Sure, it has other rune replacement powers, but Ultrahand is quite obviously in a totally different class. In BotW, it felt as though a similar number of shrines were devoted to each Sheikah rune. In TotK, unless it's one of the new and improved combat shrines or the handful of Recall shrines, it's an Ultrahand shrine. We'll talk about Fuse in a minute, but Ascend is basically just an important piece of your character's mobility kit with very few puzzle applications, and while Recall wonderfully sports creative puzzle, combat, AND convenience applications, it feels tragically underutilized. Ultrahand is very definitely the limitless multitool that the player is expected to use when resolving almost every non-combat situation.
Ultrahand is Magnesis, but everything is metal and everything can be glued together. This means that you can make whatever stupid bridge you want to get over your obstacles, but more importantly it means you can build cars. Building stuff is not just something you CAN do, it's something that shrines and sidequests constantly require you to do. Part of the controversy that has publicly engulfed these building systems is that interacting with them at all requires you to fiddle with pieces and parts until you have something that might work, then you try it, screw it up, and rebuild the whole-ass thing from scratch. The sky islands (a failure of Skyward Sword that I really did not need to be reminded of) demand a particularly goddamned obnoxious amount of screwing around with stupid flying junkpiles. Now would be the opportune time to point out that saving your game does not preserve anything you have built. If your ramshackle whirligig does not have enough batteries to reach your destination or your fan distribution is off balance or if your glider doesn't fall off the edge of the island just right or if you die before you can deliver the 15 logs you've hot-glued together, it doesn't matter whether you've saved first or not. You're building that whole shit over again, and boy, I hope you don't do a worse job this time because of how bored and pissed off you are about having to do it again! The only Zelda game that has ever frustrated me as much as this particular feature of TotK is the raw difficulty and classic cruelty of Zelda 2... but I can save-state in Zelda 2. Mercifully, there IS an auto-build power buried in the game if you can actually find it. UN-mercifully it's highly particular about exact numbers of parts and demands a somewhat scarce resource to make up the difference if you're short on anything, which drastically limits its usefulness. It's good that it's here but bad that it's buried, and it feels insufficient.
Ultrahand's ability to build blows the game's puzzles wide open, and I have to applaud the team for MOSTLY succeeding at accommodating this outrageous level of player power. Between this and Ascend's utterly wild mobility, an extreme amount of attention had to be paid to every situation in every environment, and they've done a remarkable job with this. And yet... when a player has this much power to solve any problem just by building whatever weird bullshit first enters their mind, so many of those problems no longer feel like puzzles. Take the looseness of BotW any further and rather than puzzles with a few different solutions that click into place in the player's mind, you start getting things that just feel like trivial annoyances because they player doesn't feel like they "solved" something. They just feel like they nonsensed their way through some meaningless chaos that only slowed them down. Even in these shrines where the materials the developers offer you have clearly been carefully considered, things sometimes feel as though they've lost all meaning... as if that puzzle wasn't a PUZZLE, it was just a... pile of things. The player no longer feels smart for solving it. They just did the only thing that made sense to them. Doing what comes naturally until it suddenly works doesn't necessarily feel like a satisfying puzzle. Those "aha" moments usually come from being forced to think outside of your own personal box. Without the friction of having to meet the puzzle on its own terms, it just becomes you going about your basic business. Speaking of piles of things...
I hate Fuse. I'll just go right ahead and say it. The idea is clearly meant to inspire the player toward building creative custom weapons, but this is twice as much trouble as its worth. Firstly, just to get this out of the way, most of the fused weapons and shields look absolutely terrible. There are SOME things the player can make that look like reasonable, believable weapons, but especially in the early game players will be gluing boulders to the ends of sticks over and over again. In the first few hours I thought that maybe I was clever for sticking a bomb flower onto my shield, but it didn't take long for me to realize that having a ridiculous floating cartoon bomb forever hovering unstuck from my back was invasive enough to ruin my first viewing of every new cutscene. Fortunately shields aren't all that important to gameplay in general and I simply stopped fusing things to them, but to play TotK without fusing new weapons would be a task beyond misery. TotK has used its story's inciting incident as an excuse to turn every weapon in all of Hyrule into actual garbage. I consider this to have been a big, stupid mistake.
The durability system in BotW exists because while exploration should be valuable through the thrills of adventure alone, as a general rule it should also lead to treasure. In case you somehow STILL do not get this after having half a decade to think about it, your weapons break in BotW so that thirty-seven hours into the game, you will still care about finding a fiery greatsword. You churn through your rewards in order to make room for new rewards, which will still have utility. Otherwise the whole reward economy falls apart, and players start complaining that they put in a bunch of effort to explore something and didn't find anything worthwhile. These little treats are also essential for offsetting the player's opportunity cost. Exploring frequently eats into a player's resources... such as their weapon durability. In Tears of the Kingdom, almost everything that Link finds is either clothing (which is still upgraded in the same way which encourages commitment to a single set, making the player uninterested in almost all of it) or actual trash. If you want new weapons, you're going to have to cook them. I say "cook them" because the process evokes one of the most boring activities that existed in Breath of the Wild... cooking, which also returns in TotK completely unchanged because according to suit-wearers who do not actually play these games, every AAA video game of this decade must have crafting. Cooking, Fuse, and occasionally Ultrahand building all involve the player standing around and scrolling through huge lists of too many things, dropping them out from menu to game world, and then making them into the thing they need to be. With Ultrahand this can get time consuming because it takes a while to get the hang of rotating objects into their desired positions, and even WITH "the hang" it's a lot of inputs. With cooking this can get time consuming because there are too many animations and you're probably going to be making a million things at once. With Fuse this can get time consuming because you have a limited weapon inventory that you are constantly churning through and everything that you find on the ground is unusable, so you have to take time out of your life every so often to drop what you're doing and fill your inventory with things you can actually use. In the beginning you might actually be inclined to experiment with this, but before long you'll just be sticking Black Bokoblin horns onto everything because you have a ton of them, they're not super valuable, and they have decent attack power. In BotW you were likely to hold onto your fancy weapons as best you could, but as you eventually picked up better stuff, you'd end up using them sooner or later. In TotK the game keeps giving me diamonds and I have only used them to complete quests. I have enough of everything else on hand that I don't need to, and they're too valuable. Thus in the name of cost efficiency I slog through enemy health bars with mediocre weapons far more than I did in BotW. You can call this "a me thing" all you want, but this is the kind of player psychology that game development revolves around. If you don't want to stop and cook yourself some new weapons, your alternative is to waste time (and resources) slapping your enemies with pool noodles, which will then make it harder to get any of the resources you COULD use to cook more weapons, because they're all drops from high level enemies.
By now you've either stopped reading because you disagree with all of this and you hate me now, or you've noticed the pattern. TotK improves almost nothing from BotW and either further aggravates the old problems or invents new ones where none existed. I felt the need to establish all of this before revealing just how hung up I am on the BIGGEST problem that did not previously exist. I have already seen this entire world. Zelda as a franchise is, at its very core, about exploration. The darkest moments in the series are those at which it had forgotten this. Can you tell that I don't like Skyward Sword? TotK feels at first like it may still be full of such new frontiers, what with its glue-guns and rocketships, but once the capabilities of the player's toolset have been laid bare on a worse, more annoying version of the first game's Great Plateau (right down to being chaperoned by a king's ghost), players are dropped into the exact same world that they've already milked dry in the first game, only now there are caves and climate change and some huge, distracting pillars of detritus hanging in the clouds and ruining the view.
I am truly, sincerely stunned by how little TotK does to alter the map or your quest across it, especially after seeing it leave systems like Koroks and great fairies without even so much as a re-flavoring. Yes, there are now entrances leading down into a huge, boring, frustrating, single-biome darkness map and yes, the first game's NPCs have shuffled around a bit, but if I may spoil something that becomes evident only a few hours into the game, there has been no significant timeskip. The Korok forest has not burned down. The desert has not flooded. There are no new mountains and the civilizations of the world have scarcely budged. The biggest singular change on the entire map is the removal of a liquid from one of the previous game's four main quest areas. These four places, by the way, all reprise their exact same roles. Your main, overarching quest in Tears of the Kingdom is to go back to the same four places, and help them with a new problem in the same fashion as you did in Breath of the Wild. In each location you will meet primarily the same characters, since, again, it's been only a year or two since the last time you were there. Faron still has some cool environments and not much else. The Gerudo Highlands is still just a redundant mountain zone with a couple of shrines in it so that there isn't a big empty hole in the map. Rather than granting new and interesting significance to any of these places, perhaps precipitated by the emergence of a dungeon, we go to the same Rito village with the same layout and mostly the same inhabitants, only this time it's snowing really hard. The Gerudo Desert at least has somewhat of an interesting hook, but the only things it feels like I'm discovering in this world outside of new game mechanics and shrines is that everything is exactly where I left it. With the exception of A Link Between Worlds, a much shorter, breezier game which was an intentional return to a long forgotten, much requested form, this has never happened in the history of the franchise, and with very good reason. This is not discovery. This cannot possibly compete with a Hyrule that I have not already seen. Breath of the Wild already suffers rather grievously on repeat playthroughs as its main quest content is weak and actually going through the motions of its side content quickly becomes a slog if the player is not discovering that content afresh. I have done all of the shrines in Breath of the Wild twice. Once on release, and once a few years ago on Master Mode with all of the DLC. Going through those motions in Tears of the Kingdom is far more laborious, and I can tell you right now that I don't ever foresee myself wanting to replay it for any reason other than intellectual retrospective curiosity after a decade or two.
I can and DO obliterate Ocarina of Time over the weekend several times a year. I play it by way of its randomizer, but I'd be having almost as much fun if I were just doing the vanilla game over and over. Going through the motions with OoT is fun all of the way through. Going through these motions even ONCE with TotK has been exhausting. Even the overworld shrine quests have become far less interesting, now revolving almost exclusively around figuring out how you'd like to move a big crystal from point A to point B. In BotW they were the endpoints of more interesting sidequests, or riddles given by the game's best character, Kass, who is now mysteriously and egregiously absent from the entirety of TotK. Scrubbing this same map for a third time became a chore for me almost immediately because my wonder with this world has been long spent and the side content, like that of its predecessor, is so vast and so repetitive that I burn out and glaze over by the time I even hit 30% shrine completion. For the record, no, I have not been going for all of the Koroks or all of the bubbul frogs or even all of the lightroots. I did all of the shrines and basically all of the sidequests. I know that I didn't have to do this. I also know that the most fun I had with the game was definitely from the shrines in Akkala and that the alternatives were to not play it at all or to just play the main quest, and I know that the main quests of BOTH of these games pale in comparison to those which came before them.
When I say that, I'm not talking about story. That's another topic for another paragraph. I'm talking about dungeons and their overworld introductions. For the record, a full suite of excellent dungeons was at the absolute top of my TotK wishlist. The Divine Beasts of Breath of the Wild are its most commonly cited disappointment. There are only four of them, they're quite short, they're all very similar. In aesthetic they were virtually identical, and due to their story context as ancient mecha, they weren't even trying to feel like places. The dungeon spelunker's mystique of delving into places ancient, frightful, and beautiful was pretty much totally absent, and that's roughly half of the Zelda franchise's appeal. Please know then, that when I tell you I genuinely prefer those Divine Beasts to the dungeons in Tears of the Kingdom, and that these dungeons are my least favorite in the entire series to date, I do not say so lightly. Not all of TotK's dungeons are created equal of course... I enjoyed my second dungeon significantly more than the first. My first dungeon was that of the Rito, which is, right down to its aesthetic, almost exactly a BotW Divine Beast. It asks you to activate four terminals hidden in self-contained offshoot puzzle chambers in any order, and then activate a main, overarching device so that you can fight the painfully mediocre boss. Even if the jumping path up to the dungeon is counted as part of it, it left me even less whelmed than its BotW predecessor did because of one crucial, critical difference. You cannot move the dungeon. The only thing that kept the Divine Beasts from feeling like stapled together shrines was the fact that each one had a positional gimmick that varied in function from beast to beast. In each one, you needed to assess every state that the dungeon could be in and what the consequences of that would be when applied to the rest of the space. It may not have done so spectacularly, but it did channel the water levels of OoT's Water Temple or the central pillar of Snowpeak Ruins, or the raising and lowering of the statue in Ancient Cistern, or the multiple entrances of Skull Woods, or the pillars supporting Eagle's Tower, or any of the other twelve or so examples I could give off of the top of my head. The Gerudo dungeon which I sought out second thankfully felt like an actual place of danger that existed in the world... a dungeon, if you will. Unfortunately it finally revealed to me TotK's fatalest flaw... the kiss of death for this entire video game. TotK has systemized its entire experience all the way to hell and back. In "traditional" post-LttP Zelda games, players would find a new item in each new dungeon. This meant that they would find themselves in a new space, often with its own new, bespoke mechanics, and would be given a new tool to experiment with and learn how to use. In Breath of the Wild, the unique element of surprise was at least preserved in the different possible states of each beast. Those movements were unique to the space, and were a new mechanic to be learned, even if each was similar in concept to the last. In Tears of the Kingdom, the Lightning Temple revolves around mirrors which I had already seen and used extensively in several shrines. Every gameplay element of the dungeon was one I was already familiar with, and thus I never had to process or explore new information. Being in that dungeon felt no different from being anywhere else in the game. It was full of enemies that I simply ran past because they posed me no actual threat and killing them would have taken more resources than they were worth, and I had to find the not-so-hidden path forward until I could find the four not-shrines and get to the boss. I used the same Zonai devices I'd been seeing all game long and the same powers that I'd had all game long, in the same exact ways. More than ever before, the formula has won. In case I need to make this clear: In a game about discovery and exploration, a game that lives or dies on surprise, the formula is the enemy.
The main thing that I wanted after Breath of the Wild was a Zelda game with a little less overworld and a lot more underworld. Marvel then at my audacity, as I bitch and whine about the underworld that TotK gave me, because I don't like the dungeons, I don't like the depths and I don't really like the caves all that much either. Both the depths and the caves frequently lead to situations where the answer is not in front of you. You can follow a trail of statues halfway across the depths only to find no reward except a dead end because the actual, meager reward is actually something you access from the surface, could have done all along, and has nothing to do with this goose chase you've been on. Many of the times that your shrine detector goes off (once you finally move the mountains the game asks you to move in order to re-unlock this previously free starting feature of the first game that is now withheld from the player for no sensible reason) the shrine it's leading you toward is actually only accessible through a cave entrance that's hidden a few mountains over. When fast traveling to the shrine nearest to your next destination, it is extremely common to find yourself a mile underground, looking for a decent stalactite to ascend through... a tiny and annoying surprise that adds irksome seconds onto your commute. These frustrations just barely manage to outweigh the things that I actually like about caves. Many of them are fun, shrine-like obstacle course diversions and each contains the equivalent of a Skulltula token, which like in OoT only true freakopaths will collect all of, as the worthwhile rewards cap out at around 50 of them. Of the depths however, I'm more critical.
Because the depths were kept under wraps by The Big N until the game launched, the sheer surprise at learning of another whole Hyrule-sized map in the game I think has caused people to give that map a bit too much credit. The depths are all one biome with two appearances: total darkness, or admittedly cool, spore-filled underground cavern. Total darkness is rarely fun as a game mechanic and isn't fun here either. Even if you get cute about keeping a fire weapon out or trying to fuse brightblooms to things or drinking glow potions, you're probably just going to resort to either constantly tossing brightblooms out manually or walking around in the dark. It's an annoyance that contributes pretty much nothing at all. I would have enjoyed exploring the depths significantly more if I could actually see them, because it would have meant that I wasn't continuously running into giant invisible walls and wondering how far it reaches along any spatial axis. The darkness means that I can't even tell if the reason I can't see the next lightroot is because there isn't one or because something else I can't see is blocking my sightline and I'm actually right next to it. Even when I'm willing to spam the brightblooms, finding the edges of walls and obstacles can often take an eternity and it's better just to stumble in blind frustration. Once the lightroots have made it possible to see, there simply are not that many captivating discoveries awaiting on this map, and it was not long before I started to regard it as nothing more than a whole other full-sized map for me to do my chores on. The fact that it's full of more dangerous enemies means nothing to me. Due to the resource mechanics and the sparse distribution of those enemies, I fought almost none of them. Just like in the rest of the game, there was typically no reason to. I did not enjoy feeling my way around mostly enclosed spaces like the Korok Forest, and only the couple of main dungeons found down there were able to get me anywhere near the Old Zelda tomb raiding for which I hunger.
"Found" is a fun word to use here, because I was having a bad enough time with TotK that even though I'd started my playthrough on launch day, the game had been out for three months before I finally got around to fumbling through the depths for enough hours to find either of them, and the one that surprised me wasn't the one you'd expect. The internet had already told me about the "secret" one, and once I'd heard that you could just do it whenever, I became excited. When Breath of the Wild was first showing us its trailers, I was thrilled to see that they were "doing Zelda 1." My pre-release fantasies for BotW were largely predicated on the experience of that very first game's dungeons. In Zelda 1, the player can just stumble their way into Level 8: The Lion within the first ten minutes of the game, and if they are a bad enough dude to save the president, they can totally just beat it. Having been given no guidance, they can just FIND a giant, ancient tomb swarming with danger and evil, and just DO it. I had hoped that upon finding these dungeons, be they jungle temples or graveyard mausoleums or dilapidated mansions, players would hunt in the surrounding area, do their crafting and cooking in preparation, and then venture inside to clear out that vast and perilous complex. These "hidden" main dungeons did not materialize with BotW, and as each of TotK's trailers increasingly fixated on overworld engineering and assorted sky islanding, I abandoned any hope that TotK would finish fulfilling my vision for Breath of the Wild. I was thus quite surprised to learn that players in TotK can simply FIND one of TotK's later dungeons in an unexpected location long before the game's story directs them to it. I was then quite disappointed to realize that they can't actually DO that dungeon when they find it unless they've either looked up the exact steps they have to perform on two other maps in order to open it, know those steps from a previous playthrough, or got straight up lucky while exploring a seemingly unrelated area under zero visibility. I myself was led by my shrine chasing to only a few steps away from the trigger for this sequence break, and missed what was right in front of me because I was flying blind. Even if one jumps through these hoops just to spite the very concept of linearity, they're not playing havoc with the intended storytelling in any way that's actually interesting.
Breath of the Wild had a very light touch to its storytelling. Link is informed from the start of the game that his goal is to recover his lost strength and defeat Ganon, preferably assisted by the liberated souls of his old friends. Outside of maybe a few cutscenes at the homes of those friends, BotW's storytelling is concerned with character, not plot. This makes these scenes perfect for optional content which can be experienced at any time and in any order. They're scenes in a story that we know has already ended in tragedy. Sure, it can sate our curiosities over WHY that ending came to pass, but the plot details and revelations contained therein are basically irrelevant. None of it is important to understanding anything about Link's mission. Instead BotW's memory scenes exist to invest the player emotionally in what they are avenging, and at the very least it certainly worked on me. BotW's Princess Zelda is my favorite iteration of the character by a country mile, and that prequel story with her as its focus is the emotional core of BotW. It provides Link's entire lonesome quest with a purpose both dire and beautiful, even if the Champions are a rote and hollow parade of paper-thin anime tropes.
If Tears of the Kingdom has such a core, I have not found it. I'll keep my spoilers contained to the next giant paragraph so that you can skip them if you like, but in my honest opinion, you had might as well just spoil it now. It's not worth the effort.
In the opening hour of Tears of the Kingdom, Link and Zelda are separated by a reawakened, once-defeated Ganondorf, here presented as an imposing, incredible lich-samurai who should absolutely not be speaking with Matt Mercer's most generic monster voice. For the record, I LIKE Matt Mercer. He's got talent, he seems like one of the nicest people alive, and he is definitely just giving Nintendo exactly what they asked him for. The problem is that Nintendo does horrible voice direction on anything that isn't Xenoblade. In BotW I was able to look past Princess Zelda's thick slathering of Mystical Briticism and overly breathy delivery on every line as well as the strange, hollow performances from everyone else, but I just cannot abide this English Ganondorf. In Japanese, Italian, Spanish and German in particular, he sounds absolutely divine. I played in Japanese, and the other performances have helped to crystalize my opinion that what Nintendo has is not a localization problem. Most of the Japanese performances don't feel much different from the English ones in terms of quality. While I understand that Nintendo rarely focuses on highly cinematic games, I am exhausted with this. It really, really is not that hard to get good voicework into your ultra-blockbuster AAAA automatic game-of-the-year releases in 2023, and I can no longer watch Nintendo Directs in English because the kindergarten teachers they hire to read the presentations make me want to crush my own eardrums. Thankfully the soundtrack is about as blessed as ever and benefits from a somewhat reduced focus on the previous game's piano. Of course, Kass's Theme doesn't even play ONCE, so the rules say that the OST gets a zero. Sorry, them's just the numbers. Anyway, the decision to immediately remove Zelda herself as a character in a direct sequel after she's already played her traditional damsel role is depressing for a litany of reasons that I don't think we need to work through right now. It's not exactly an uncommon sentiment. We do however acquire some things in this somewhat unfavorable trade. The first of our boons is a POV character with which to explore this game's equivalent of BotW's memory cutscenes, but rather than character-building emotional resonators, these scenes serve as lore dumps and critical plot information. Too critical in fact, because one of them unceremoniously spoils one of the other acquisitions: A situation wherein Ganondorf is "distracting" Link by having him chase phantoms of Zelda all over Hyrule. In a certain way, this is an interesting perversion of Link and Zelda's eternal relationship, with Link's entire purpose in most games being the chasing after of his princess, and that being predictable and exploitable. It's too bad that any player who is thinking about what's happening AT ALL will realize almost immediately that every image of the princess they come across is an imposter, regardless of whether they bumble into the cutscene that just blurts out the fact that Ganondorf has done exactly this in the past. Whether you find this scene or you just get fed up with how overbearingly thick the game lays it on and figure it out dozens of hours too early, it's going to ruin the reveal at Hyrule Castle either way. It's a shame, because both the concept and the scene itself are rather strong, and if they had been used correctly they could have amounted to a captivating twist. Instead it constantly feels like the story is talking down to its audience, expecting them to be enthralled by the grand mystery of the Princess's behavior and to be completely unable to retain information of any kind. Each generically named dungeon follows the same stifling formula wherein one of Link's friends receives a phone call from their nameless, faceless, personality-less ancestor who bequeaths onto them the power of a sage. In the process of this, each ancestor recounts the exact same information about The Imprisoning War, a plot element which we have imported directly from A Link to the Past rather than try anything new. This same flashback information is then relayed AGAIN when all four initial dungeons are complete and the group settles in one place. I felt, quite sincerely, like I was playing Pokemon Sword or Shield. Across dozens of hours I was being presented with the same redundant information about a paper-thin non-mystery while the game expects me to respond with "The Darkest Day??????" in all the eagerness expected of a child watching Dora the Explorer. I was still receiving these cutscenes and playing hide and seek to "fall into" Ganondorf's trap literally (I've checked my play activity, though these are very rough estimates) over 100 hours after I found the spoiler cutscene, at least 140 hours after I had figured out the plot myself, and about 30 hours after I found the real princess. Finding her, by the way, is the best of our trading spoils. It's a nice re-take on an idea from Skyward Sword that provides one of the only moments of the game I found truly touching. It's also probably the only thing I liked about the memory scene replacements. As I said, this time they serve as lore dumps more than anything else. Zelda is used as a window through which the game can introduce the Zonai, our less cool Sheikah replacement race who provide the lore excuses for a whole new suite of shrines and the presence of fans, tires, and flamethrowers now covering every inch of Hyrule. I do not like them. Breath of the Wild introduced a strange and fascinating version of Hyrule that exists so far down whatever permutation of The Zelda Timeline you believe in that it become newly mysterious. Anything could have happened in that time, and the idea of exploring the lore of a far future, borderline science fiction Hyrule was captivating. Rather than a deeper exploration of that world, TotK feels like a retcon to it. The Zonai may have been teased as some vanished, mysterious tribe in BotW, but this reveal of them as techno-magical goat people from the sky were REALLY behind everything all along and who are ALSO the royalty of this Hyrule which is ALSO not any previous Hyrule but has played out almost EXACTLY like previous Hyrule because we're re-using all the same plot points, feels like an arbitrary pivot rather than a pre-planned direction. It feels as though the Zonai and their war against Ganondorf overwrite BotW, not expand upon it. It is a somewhat petty annoyance, but an annoyance all the same. More importantly, these cutscenes detailing where Zelda ended up, Ganondorf's rise and fall, and the McGuffins around which the plot kind of revolves is all sort of really important information that would be much better told in sequence. That spoiler cutscene for example feels like it's supposed to be a big dramatic twist but divorced from all of its context and build-up it doesn't much feel like anything at all. All of these should really have been split into groups and played after dungeons during the main story, while the "memory" scenes should have been character moments taking place during the gap between games. It is a story that doesn't feel optional enough for this, which is why the bare essentials of it are told to the player literally five times along the main questline, just in case that's their first time hearing it. Sure, you could just... have a flag in the code to check or change how information is distributed... or you could have people go make sandwiches through most of the main story's cutscenes. Fortunately, this story does lead up to a lovely final confrontation, and I would not hesitate to say that the final boss gauntlet of TotK is the best in the series. Considering that BotW has the worst, I'd certainly call that a victory. Ganondorf puts up a true, genuine fight, especially to someone who hasn't been upgrading their armor. It's a great finale... but it's not enough to lift my tremendous shroud of negativity.
Beyond my initial session on the sky plateau, almost every sitting that I spent knocking out shrines and sidequests in TotK felt like a wasted day. It's not even that the shrines are bad, they're really, really not, but in completing most of them I felt nothing. It's easy to say that I should have just gotten on with the main quest, but much like in BotW, that "main" content did not thrill me any more than my shrine and sidequest meanderings. If I had stuck only to those main objectives, I would not feel that I'd had an experience worth $70 any more than I currently do. The shrines at least allowed me to revel in new mechanics, even if I ultimately concluded that they were not to my taste and that I preferred BotW's diversity.
Even with all of the obvious labor that must have gone into it, I respect TotK less than any other Zelda game. I wanted BotW to be rounded out and made whole. I wanted its annoyances smoothed out and more importantly I wanted the traditional underworld half of Zelda's design to reveal itself. I wanted big, dark, vast, ominous puzzle box dungeons like in any of the previous 3D Zeldae, maybe even with such a focus that the overworld became an afterthought. BotW could have become the overworld half of the duology while TotK became the underworld half, fully representing the whole spectrum of Zelda's appeal across two enormous, beautiful games. I wanted Zelda herself to be playable, making for a more interesting story and adding a great new twist into the gameplay. I wanted a meaningfully different story structure that put a new spin on the world and kept me guessing. BotW didn't satisfy all of my wildest dreams either, but what it gave me was so fresh and exciting, so geniusly captivating, that thinking about what could have been just feels like splitting hairs. TotK enters into a world that has already played Breath of the Wild, and I never thought that I would be able to make such a direct comparison between the two. I have made it through all of this text without even once mentioning Majora's Mask and I have done so with good reason, but let me say once, here at the end, that I could not possibly make such a comparison with the N64 duology. BotW and TotK feel very much like two games attempting the same thing, and it is entirely my belief that one of them simply does that thing better. Ocarina of Time and Majora's Mask are so spiritually and designomatically different that even when they share an engine, an asset library, and a protagonist, they are apples and oranges. Video gaming's news and marketing culture was vastly different in The Year Two Thousand, and so I had neither the time nor the critical faculties to burden Majora's Mask with the specificity of expectation that I had for TotK, but even if I had, I cannot fathom even my stupid eight-year-old childbrain responding to Majora's Mask in the way that I now respond to TotK. I am more than happy to accept a sequel on its own merits, under the power of its own strengths. I am more than happy to accept a masterful video game like Breath of the Wild, even if it isn't quite everything that I'd hoped it could be. Even when I put aside these desires, these things that I WANTED from TotK, I cannot feel that it is capable of standing on its own. TotK's strengths are simply BotW's strengths, and I'm left with what I can only see as an inferior version of a game I'd rather play for a third time, and given its almost infinite potential, coming from a series that even within the confines Link to the Past's endlessly exploitable formula has radically reinvented itself a dozen times over and produced something preciously unique at every turn...
Look. I said from the start that through BotW's inheritance alone, TotK is a decent video game. I meant that. It would also be extremely disingenuous of me to downplay what a humungous gamecrafting achievement it is to make a game this generously huge and then get it running on the Switch even half as well as this thing does. I had a good deal of fun with the shrines, and there were some cool moments sprinkled throughout the main story. I want to make certain that these things are clear, because I cannot mask the fact that my experience with TotK was drench-saturated with disappointment at every turn. The surprises that it offered me were few and unhappy. The tasks which it offered me did not spark joy, and as art it left me utterly unstirred. The fact that I could build an airplane, within a matter of hours, became no more thrilling to me than rotating a tetromino in Tetris. It's just the mechanic by which the game operates and once abandoned by its novelty it is reduced to tiresome execution. It is a game of endless half-satisfactions. It's a few hours of killer and a few hundred hours of filler, and that fills me with cyberpunk dread.
My backlog gets longer every time Aonuma utters the word "formula," because if I am to survive another winter, my cupboards must be full. Now if you will excuse me, I think maybe it's time to get into Baldur's Gate and Armored Core.
Regardless of how bright-eyed and hopeful it made us, BotW was never without some rather noticeable deficiencies. While I have always recognized the necessity and the wisdom of the fools-loathed durability system, it brought with it the pestilence of accounting. Most of the times that I opened a chest in Breath of the Wild, I was told that I didn't have enough space to accept whatever weapon or shield the game had just tried to reward me with. This buzzkill moment would then either require me to pop open a menu and choose something to drop, or to close the chest and walk away. This frequent chicanery was one of BotW's biggest flaws, and it was drastically exacerbated by the decision to repeatedly HIDE the NPC who expands the player's inventory. As much as I liked the Korok puzzles in their position as elegant curiosity reward nuggets for any players who intuitively secret-hunted in the nooks and crannies of the world, Hestu served as a bizarre, unnecessary roadblock to put between the players and their fun.
Imagine my surprise then, when instead of the exact sort of basic quality of life improvement that one might expect from a sequel, Nintendo decided to quintuple down on that inventory nightmare. Hestu thankfully stays put in a predictable location after you initially find him this time, but he and his Koroks (like Great Fairies and a rather depressing number of other things) are back in exactly the same capacity as the first game. In fact, most of the Korok puzzles are in exactly the same style. Follow the little sapling, check the rustling leaves at the top of a building, shoot the balloons, hurry to the ring, match the rock formation, match the block formation... all of these return in equal force. There are new ones too, of course, but many of these new ones are far more tedious than types imported from BotW. I have now run right past roughly 80% of the cork Koroks I've seen because I just do not find them in any way amusing. The first time I saw one of the stranded backpack Koroks, I thought it was absolutely adorable, and frankly I still do. Nonetheless, every time I see one now I have to stifle a sigh. For most of the game I just picked them up with Ultrahand to manually carry them, because the thought of building yet another vehicular contraption just for this was so exhausting that I would rather choose the hike.
When I said that TotK had different tools, I was talking about Ultrahand. Sure, it has other rune replacement powers, but Ultrahand is quite obviously in a totally different class. In BotW, it felt as though a similar number of shrines were devoted to each Sheikah rune. In TotK, unless it's one of the new and improved combat shrines or the handful of Recall shrines, it's an Ultrahand shrine. We'll talk about Fuse in a minute, but Ascend is basically just an important piece of your character's mobility kit with very few puzzle applications, and while Recall wonderfully sports creative puzzle, combat, AND convenience applications, it feels tragically underutilized. Ultrahand is very definitely the limitless multitool that the player is expected to use when resolving almost every non-combat situation.
Ultrahand is Magnesis, but everything is metal and everything can be glued together. This means that you can make whatever stupid bridge you want to get over your obstacles, but more importantly it means you can build cars. Building stuff is not just something you CAN do, it's something that shrines and sidequests constantly require you to do. Part of the controversy that has publicly engulfed these building systems is that interacting with them at all requires you to fiddle with pieces and parts until you have something that might work, then you try it, screw it up, and rebuild the whole-ass thing from scratch. The sky islands (a failure of Skyward Sword that I really did not need to be reminded of) demand a particularly goddamned obnoxious amount of screwing around with stupid flying junkpiles. Now would be the opportune time to point out that saving your game does not preserve anything you have built. If your ramshackle whirligig does not have enough batteries to reach your destination or your fan distribution is off balance or if your glider doesn't fall off the edge of the island just right or if you die before you can deliver the 15 logs you've hot-glued together, it doesn't matter whether you've saved first or not. You're building that whole shit over again, and boy, I hope you don't do a worse job this time because of how bored and pissed off you are about having to do it again! The only Zelda game that has ever frustrated me as much as this particular feature of TotK is the raw difficulty and classic cruelty of Zelda 2... but I can save-state in Zelda 2. Mercifully, there IS an auto-build power buried in the game if you can actually find it. UN-mercifully it's highly particular about exact numbers of parts and demands a somewhat scarce resource to make up the difference if you're short on anything, which drastically limits its usefulness. It's good that it's here but bad that it's buried, and it feels insufficient.
Ultrahand's ability to build blows the game's puzzles wide open, and I have to applaud the team for MOSTLY succeeding at accommodating this outrageous level of player power. Between this and Ascend's utterly wild mobility, an extreme amount of attention had to be paid to every situation in every environment, and they've done a remarkable job with this. And yet... when a player has this much power to solve any problem just by building whatever weird bullshit first enters their mind, so many of those problems no longer feel like puzzles. Take the looseness of BotW any further and rather than puzzles with a few different solutions that click into place in the player's mind, you start getting things that just feel like trivial annoyances because they player doesn't feel like they "solved" something. They just feel like they nonsensed their way through some meaningless chaos that only slowed them down. Even in these shrines where the materials the developers offer you have clearly been carefully considered, things sometimes feel as though they've lost all meaning... as if that puzzle wasn't a PUZZLE, it was just a... pile of things. The player no longer feels smart for solving it. They just did the only thing that made sense to them. Doing what comes naturally until it suddenly works doesn't necessarily feel like a satisfying puzzle. Those "aha" moments usually come from being forced to think outside of your own personal box. Without the friction of having to meet the puzzle on its own terms, it just becomes you going about your basic business. Speaking of piles of things...
I hate Fuse. I'll just go right ahead and say it. The idea is clearly meant to inspire the player toward building creative custom weapons, but this is twice as much trouble as its worth. Firstly, just to get this out of the way, most of the fused weapons and shields look absolutely terrible. There are SOME things the player can make that look like reasonable, believable weapons, but especially in the early game players will be gluing boulders to the ends of sticks over and over again. In the first few hours I thought that maybe I was clever for sticking a bomb flower onto my shield, but it didn't take long for me to realize that having a ridiculous floating cartoon bomb forever hovering unstuck from my back was invasive enough to ruin my first viewing of every new cutscene. Fortunately shields aren't all that important to gameplay in general and I simply stopped fusing things to them, but to play TotK without fusing new weapons would be a task beyond misery. TotK has used its story's inciting incident as an excuse to turn every weapon in all of Hyrule into actual garbage. I consider this to have been a big, stupid mistake.
The durability system in BotW exists because while exploration should be valuable through the thrills of adventure alone, as a general rule it should also lead to treasure. In case you somehow STILL do not get this after having half a decade to think about it, your weapons break in BotW so that thirty-seven hours into the game, you will still care about finding a fiery greatsword. You churn through your rewards in order to make room for new rewards, which will still have utility. Otherwise the whole reward economy falls apart, and players start complaining that they put in a bunch of effort to explore something and didn't find anything worthwhile. These little treats are also essential for offsetting the player's opportunity cost. Exploring frequently eats into a player's resources... such as their weapon durability. In Tears of the Kingdom, almost everything that Link finds is either clothing (which is still upgraded in the same way which encourages commitment to a single set, making the player uninterested in almost all of it) or actual trash. If you want new weapons, you're going to have to cook them. I say "cook them" because the process evokes one of the most boring activities that existed in Breath of the Wild... cooking, which also returns in TotK completely unchanged because according to suit-wearers who do not actually play these games, every AAA video game of this decade must have crafting. Cooking, Fuse, and occasionally Ultrahand building all involve the player standing around and scrolling through huge lists of too many things, dropping them out from menu to game world, and then making them into the thing they need to be. With Ultrahand this can get time consuming because it takes a while to get the hang of rotating objects into their desired positions, and even WITH "the hang" it's a lot of inputs. With cooking this can get time consuming because there are too many animations and you're probably going to be making a million things at once. With Fuse this can get time consuming because you have a limited weapon inventory that you are constantly churning through and everything that you find on the ground is unusable, so you have to take time out of your life every so often to drop what you're doing and fill your inventory with things you can actually use. In the beginning you might actually be inclined to experiment with this, but before long you'll just be sticking Black Bokoblin horns onto everything because you have a ton of them, they're not super valuable, and they have decent attack power. In BotW you were likely to hold onto your fancy weapons as best you could, but as you eventually picked up better stuff, you'd end up using them sooner or later. In TotK the game keeps giving me diamonds and I have only used them to complete quests. I have enough of everything else on hand that I don't need to, and they're too valuable. Thus in the name of cost efficiency I slog through enemy health bars with mediocre weapons far more than I did in BotW. You can call this "a me thing" all you want, but this is the kind of player psychology that game development revolves around. If you don't want to stop and cook yourself some new weapons, your alternative is to waste time (and resources) slapping your enemies with pool noodles, which will then make it harder to get any of the resources you COULD use to cook more weapons, because they're all drops from high level enemies.
By now you've either stopped reading because you disagree with all of this and you hate me now, or you've noticed the pattern. TotK improves almost nothing from BotW and either further aggravates the old problems or invents new ones where none existed. I felt the need to establish all of this before revealing just how hung up I am on the BIGGEST problem that did not previously exist. I have already seen this entire world. Zelda as a franchise is, at its very core, about exploration. The darkest moments in the series are those at which it had forgotten this. Can you tell that I don't like Skyward Sword? TotK feels at first like it may still be full of such new frontiers, what with its glue-guns and rocketships, but once the capabilities of the player's toolset have been laid bare on a worse, more annoying version of the first game's Great Plateau (right down to being chaperoned by a king's ghost), players are dropped into the exact same world that they've already milked dry in the first game, only now there are caves and climate change and some huge, distracting pillars of detritus hanging in the clouds and ruining the view.
I am truly, sincerely stunned by how little TotK does to alter the map or your quest across it, especially after seeing it leave systems like Koroks and great fairies without even so much as a re-flavoring. Yes, there are now entrances leading down into a huge, boring, frustrating, single-biome darkness map and yes, the first game's NPCs have shuffled around a bit, but if I may spoil something that becomes evident only a few hours into the game, there has been no significant timeskip. The Korok forest has not burned down. The desert has not flooded. There are no new mountains and the civilizations of the world have scarcely budged. The biggest singular change on the entire map is the removal of a liquid from one of the previous game's four main quest areas. These four places, by the way, all reprise their exact same roles. Your main, overarching quest in Tears of the Kingdom is to go back to the same four places, and help them with a new problem in the same fashion as you did in Breath of the Wild. In each location you will meet primarily the same characters, since, again, it's been only a year or two since the last time you were there. Faron still has some cool environments and not much else. The Gerudo Highlands is still just a redundant mountain zone with a couple of shrines in it so that there isn't a big empty hole in the map. Rather than granting new and interesting significance to any of these places, perhaps precipitated by the emergence of a dungeon, we go to the same Rito village with the same layout and mostly the same inhabitants, only this time it's snowing really hard. The Gerudo Desert at least has somewhat of an interesting hook, but the only things it feels like I'm discovering in this world outside of new game mechanics and shrines is that everything is exactly where I left it. With the exception of A Link Between Worlds, a much shorter, breezier game which was an intentional return to a long forgotten, much requested form, this has never happened in the history of the franchise, and with very good reason. This is not discovery. This cannot possibly compete with a Hyrule that I have not already seen. Breath of the Wild already suffers rather grievously on repeat playthroughs as its main quest content is weak and actually going through the motions of its side content quickly becomes a slog if the player is not discovering that content afresh. I have done all of the shrines in Breath of the Wild twice. Once on release, and once a few years ago on Master Mode with all of the DLC. Going through those motions in Tears of the Kingdom is far more laborious, and I can tell you right now that I don't ever foresee myself wanting to replay it for any reason other than intellectual retrospective curiosity after a decade or two.
I can and DO obliterate Ocarina of Time over the weekend several times a year. I play it by way of its randomizer, but I'd be having almost as much fun if I were just doing the vanilla game over and over. Going through the motions with OoT is fun all of the way through. Going through these motions even ONCE with TotK has been exhausting. Even the overworld shrine quests have become far less interesting, now revolving almost exclusively around figuring out how you'd like to move a big crystal from point A to point B. In BotW they were the endpoints of more interesting sidequests, or riddles given by the game's best character, Kass, who is now mysteriously and egregiously absent from the entirety of TotK. Scrubbing this same map for a third time became a chore for me almost immediately because my wonder with this world has been long spent and the side content, like that of its predecessor, is so vast and so repetitive that I burn out and glaze over by the time I even hit 30% shrine completion. For the record, no, I have not been going for all of the Koroks or all of the bubbul frogs or even all of the lightroots. I did all of the shrines and basically all of the sidequests. I know that I didn't have to do this. I also know that the most fun I had with the game was definitely from the shrines in Akkala and that the alternatives were to not play it at all or to just play the main quest, and I know that the main quests of BOTH of these games pale in comparison to those which came before them.
When I say that, I'm not talking about story. That's another topic for another paragraph. I'm talking about dungeons and their overworld introductions. For the record, a full suite of excellent dungeons was at the absolute top of my TotK wishlist. The Divine Beasts of Breath of the Wild are its most commonly cited disappointment. There are only four of them, they're quite short, they're all very similar. In aesthetic they were virtually identical, and due to their story context as ancient mecha, they weren't even trying to feel like places. The dungeon spelunker's mystique of delving into places ancient, frightful, and beautiful was pretty much totally absent, and that's roughly half of the Zelda franchise's appeal. Please know then, that when I tell you I genuinely prefer those Divine Beasts to the dungeons in Tears of the Kingdom, and that these dungeons are my least favorite in the entire series to date, I do not say so lightly. Not all of TotK's dungeons are created equal of course... I enjoyed my second dungeon significantly more than the first. My first dungeon was that of the Rito, which is, right down to its aesthetic, almost exactly a BotW Divine Beast. It asks you to activate four terminals hidden in self-contained offshoot puzzle chambers in any order, and then activate a main, overarching device so that you can fight the painfully mediocre boss. Even if the jumping path up to the dungeon is counted as part of it, it left me even less whelmed than its BotW predecessor did because of one crucial, critical difference. You cannot move the dungeon. The only thing that kept the Divine Beasts from feeling like stapled together shrines was the fact that each one had a positional gimmick that varied in function from beast to beast. In each one, you needed to assess every state that the dungeon could be in and what the consequences of that would be when applied to the rest of the space. It may not have done so spectacularly, but it did channel the water levels of OoT's Water Temple or the central pillar of Snowpeak Ruins, or the raising and lowering of the statue in Ancient Cistern, or the multiple entrances of Skull Woods, or the pillars supporting Eagle's Tower, or any of the other twelve or so examples I could give off of the top of my head. The Gerudo dungeon which I sought out second thankfully felt like an actual place of danger that existed in the world... a dungeon, if you will. Unfortunately it finally revealed to me TotK's fatalest flaw... the kiss of death for this entire video game. TotK has systemized its entire experience all the way to hell and back. In "traditional" post-LttP Zelda games, players would find a new item in each new dungeon. This meant that they would find themselves in a new space, often with its own new, bespoke mechanics, and would be given a new tool to experiment with and learn how to use. In Breath of the Wild, the unique element of surprise was at least preserved in the different possible states of each beast. Those movements were unique to the space, and were a new mechanic to be learned, even if each was similar in concept to the last. In Tears of the Kingdom, the Lightning Temple revolves around mirrors which I had already seen and used extensively in several shrines. Every gameplay element of the dungeon was one I was already familiar with, and thus I never had to process or explore new information. Being in that dungeon felt no different from being anywhere else in the game. It was full of enemies that I simply ran past because they posed me no actual threat and killing them would have taken more resources than they were worth, and I had to find the not-so-hidden path forward until I could find the four not-shrines and get to the boss. I used the same Zonai devices I'd been seeing all game long and the same powers that I'd had all game long, in the same exact ways. More than ever before, the formula has won. In case I need to make this clear: In a game about discovery and exploration, a game that lives or dies on surprise, the formula is the enemy.
The main thing that I wanted after Breath of the Wild was a Zelda game with a little less overworld and a lot more underworld. Marvel then at my audacity, as I bitch and whine about the underworld that TotK gave me, because I don't like the dungeons, I don't like the depths and I don't really like the caves all that much either. Both the depths and the caves frequently lead to situations where the answer is not in front of you. You can follow a trail of statues halfway across the depths only to find no reward except a dead end because the actual, meager reward is actually something you access from the surface, could have done all along, and has nothing to do with this goose chase you've been on. Many of the times that your shrine detector goes off (once you finally move the mountains the game asks you to move in order to re-unlock this previously free starting feature of the first game that is now withheld from the player for no sensible reason) the shrine it's leading you toward is actually only accessible through a cave entrance that's hidden a few mountains over. When fast traveling to the shrine nearest to your next destination, it is extremely common to find yourself a mile underground, looking for a decent stalactite to ascend through... a tiny and annoying surprise that adds irksome seconds onto your commute. These frustrations just barely manage to outweigh the things that I actually like about caves. Many of them are fun, shrine-like obstacle course diversions and each contains the equivalent of a Skulltula token, which like in OoT only true freakopaths will collect all of, as the worthwhile rewards cap out at around 50 of them. Of the depths however, I'm more critical.
Because the depths were kept under wraps by The Big N until the game launched, the sheer surprise at learning of another whole Hyrule-sized map in the game I think has caused people to give that map a bit too much credit. The depths are all one biome with two appearances: total darkness, or admittedly cool, spore-filled underground cavern. Total darkness is rarely fun as a game mechanic and isn't fun here either. Even if you get cute about keeping a fire weapon out or trying to fuse brightblooms to things or drinking glow potions, you're probably just going to resort to either constantly tossing brightblooms out manually or walking around in the dark. It's an annoyance that contributes pretty much nothing at all. I would have enjoyed exploring the depths significantly more if I could actually see them, because it would have meant that I wasn't continuously running into giant invisible walls and wondering how far it reaches along any spatial axis. The darkness means that I can't even tell if the reason I can't see the next lightroot is because there isn't one or because something else I can't see is blocking my sightline and I'm actually right next to it. Even when I'm willing to spam the brightblooms, finding the edges of walls and obstacles can often take an eternity and it's better just to stumble in blind frustration. Once the lightroots have made it possible to see, there simply are not that many captivating discoveries awaiting on this map, and it was not long before I started to regard it as nothing more than a whole other full-sized map for me to do my chores on. The fact that it's full of more dangerous enemies means nothing to me. Due to the resource mechanics and the sparse distribution of those enemies, I fought almost none of them. Just like in the rest of the game, there was typically no reason to. I did not enjoy feeling my way around mostly enclosed spaces like the Korok Forest, and only the couple of main dungeons found down there were able to get me anywhere near the Old Zelda tomb raiding for which I hunger.
"Found" is a fun word to use here, because I was having a bad enough time with TotK that even though I'd started my playthrough on launch day, the game had been out for three months before I finally got around to fumbling through the depths for enough hours to find either of them, and the one that surprised me wasn't the one you'd expect. The internet had already told me about the "secret" one, and once I'd heard that you could just do it whenever, I became excited. When Breath of the Wild was first showing us its trailers, I was thrilled to see that they were "doing Zelda 1." My pre-release fantasies for BotW were largely predicated on the experience of that very first game's dungeons. In Zelda 1, the player can just stumble their way into Level 8: The Lion within the first ten minutes of the game, and if they are a bad enough dude to save the president, they can totally just beat it. Having been given no guidance, they can just FIND a giant, ancient tomb swarming with danger and evil, and just DO it. I had hoped that upon finding these dungeons, be they jungle temples or graveyard mausoleums or dilapidated mansions, players would hunt in the surrounding area, do their crafting and cooking in preparation, and then venture inside to clear out that vast and perilous complex. These "hidden" main dungeons did not materialize with BotW, and as each of TotK's trailers increasingly fixated on overworld engineering and assorted sky islanding, I abandoned any hope that TotK would finish fulfilling my vision for Breath of the Wild. I was thus quite surprised to learn that players in TotK can simply FIND one of TotK's later dungeons in an unexpected location long before the game's story directs them to it. I was then quite disappointed to realize that they can't actually DO that dungeon when they find it unless they've either looked up the exact steps they have to perform on two other maps in order to open it, know those steps from a previous playthrough, or got straight up lucky while exploring a seemingly unrelated area under zero visibility. I myself was led by my shrine chasing to only a few steps away from the trigger for this sequence break, and missed what was right in front of me because I was flying blind. Even if one jumps through these hoops just to spite the very concept of linearity, they're not playing havoc with the intended storytelling in any way that's actually interesting.
Breath of the Wild had a very light touch to its storytelling. Link is informed from the start of the game that his goal is to recover his lost strength and defeat Ganon, preferably assisted by the liberated souls of his old friends. Outside of maybe a few cutscenes at the homes of those friends, BotW's storytelling is concerned with character, not plot. This makes these scenes perfect for optional content which can be experienced at any time and in any order. They're scenes in a story that we know has already ended in tragedy. Sure, it can sate our curiosities over WHY that ending came to pass, but the plot details and revelations contained therein are basically irrelevant. None of it is important to understanding anything about Link's mission. Instead BotW's memory scenes exist to invest the player emotionally in what they are avenging, and at the very least it certainly worked on me. BotW's Princess Zelda is my favorite iteration of the character by a country mile, and that prequel story with her as its focus is the emotional core of BotW. It provides Link's entire lonesome quest with a purpose both dire and beautiful, even if the Champions are a rote and hollow parade of paper-thin anime tropes.
If Tears of the Kingdom has such a core, I have not found it. I'll keep my spoilers contained to the next giant paragraph so that you can skip them if you like, but in my honest opinion, you had might as well just spoil it now. It's not worth the effort.
In the opening hour of Tears of the Kingdom, Link and Zelda are separated by a reawakened, once-defeated Ganondorf, here presented as an imposing, incredible lich-samurai who should absolutely not be speaking with Matt Mercer's most generic monster voice. For the record, I LIKE Matt Mercer. He's got talent, he seems like one of the nicest people alive, and he is definitely just giving Nintendo exactly what they asked him for. The problem is that Nintendo does horrible voice direction on anything that isn't Xenoblade. In BotW I was able to look past Princess Zelda's thick slathering of Mystical Briticism and overly breathy delivery on every line as well as the strange, hollow performances from everyone else, but I just cannot abide this English Ganondorf. In Japanese, Italian, Spanish and German in particular, he sounds absolutely divine. I played in Japanese, and the other performances have helped to crystalize my opinion that what Nintendo has is not a localization problem. Most of the Japanese performances don't feel much different from the English ones in terms of quality. While I understand that Nintendo rarely focuses on highly cinematic games, I am exhausted with this. It really, really is not that hard to get good voicework into your ultra-blockbuster AAAA automatic game-of-the-year releases in 2023, and I can no longer watch Nintendo Directs in English because the kindergarten teachers they hire to read the presentations make me want to crush my own eardrums. Thankfully the soundtrack is about as blessed as ever and benefits from a somewhat reduced focus on the previous game's piano. Of course, Kass's Theme doesn't even play ONCE, so the rules say that the OST gets a zero. Sorry, them's just the numbers. Anyway, the decision to immediately remove Zelda herself as a character in a direct sequel after she's already played her traditional damsel role is depressing for a litany of reasons that I don't think we need to work through right now. It's not exactly an uncommon sentiment. We do however acquire some things in this somewhat unfavorable trade. The first of our boons is a POV character with which to explore this game's equivalent of BotW's memory cutscenes, but rather than character-building emotional resonators, these scenes serve as lore dumps and critical plot information. Too critical in fact, because one of them unceremoniously spoils one of the other acquisitions: A situation wherein Ganondorf is "distracting" Link by having him chase phantoms of Zelda all over Hyrule. In a certain way, this is an interesting perversion of Link and Zelda's eternal relationship, with Link's entire purpose in most games being the chasing after of his princess, and that being predictable and exploitable. It's too bad that any player who is thinking about what's happening AT ALL will realize almost immediately that every image of the princess they come across is an imposter, regardless of whether they bumble into the cutscene that just blurts out the fact that Ganondorf has done exactly this in the past. Whether you find this scene or you just get fed up with how overbearingly thick the game lays it on and figure it out dozens of hours too early, it's going to ruin the reveal at Hyrule Castle either way. It's a shame, because both the concept and the scene itself are rather strong, and if they had been used correctly they could have amounted to a captivating twist. Instead it constantly feels like the story is talking down to its audience, expecting them to be enthralled by the grand mystery of the Princess's behavior and to be completely unable to retain information of any kind. Each generically named dungeon follows the same stifling formula wherein one of Link's friends receives a phone call from their nameless, faceless, personality-less ancestor who bequeaths onto them the power of a sage. In the process of this, each ancestor recounts the exact same information about The Imprisoning War, a plot element which we have imported directly from A Link to the Past rather than try anything new. This same flashback information is then relayed AGAIN when all four initial dungeons are complete and the group settles in one place. I felt, quite sincerely, like I was playing Pokemon Sword or Shield. Across dozens of hours I was being presented with the same redundant information about a paper-thin non-mystery while the game expects me to respond with "The Darkest Day??????" in all the eagerness expected of a child watching Dora the Explorer. I was still receiving these cutscenes and playing hide and seek to "fall into" Ganondorf's trap literally (I've checked my play activity, though these are very rough estimates) over 100 hours after I found the spoiler cutscene, at least 140 hours after I had figured out the plot myself, and about 30 hours after I found the real princess. Finding her, by the way, is the best of our trading spoils. It's a nice re-take on an idea from Skyward Sword that provides one of the only moments of the game I found truly touching. It's also probably the only thing I liked about the memory scene replacements. As I said, this time they serve as lore dumps more than anything else. Zelda is used as a window through which the game can introduce the Zonai, our less cool Sheikah replacement race who provide the lore excuses for a whole new suite of shrines and the presence of fans, tires, and flamethrowers now covering every inch of Hyrule. I do not like them. Breath of the Wild introduced a strange and fascinating version of Hyrule that exists so far down whatever permutation of The Zelda Timeline you believe in that it become newly mysterious. Anything could have happened in that time, and the idea of exploring the lore of a far future, borderline science fiction Hyrule was captivating. Rather than a deeper exploration of that world, TotK feels like a retcon to it. The Zonai may have been teased as some vanished, mysterious tribe in BotW, but this reveal of them as techno-magical goat people from the sky were REALLY behind everything all along and who are ALSO the royalty of this Hyrule which is ALSO not any previous Hyrule but has played out almost EXACTLY like previous Hyrule because we're re-using all the same plot points, feels like an arbitrary pivot rather than a pre-planned direction. It feels as though the Zonai and their war against Ganondorf overwrite BotW, not expand upon it. It is a somewhat petty annoyance, but an annoyance all the same. More importantly, these cutscenes detailing where Zelda ended up, Ganondorf's rise and fall, and the McGuffins around which the plot kind of revolves is all sort of really important information that would be much better told in sequence. That spoiler cutscene for example feels like it's supposed to be a big dramatic twist but divorced from all of its context and build-up it doesn't much feel like anything at all. All of these should really have been split into groups and played after dungeons during the main story, while the "memory" scenes should have been character moments taking place during the gap between games. It is a story that doesn't feel optional enough for this, which is why the bare essentials of it are told to the player literally five times along the main questline, just in case that's their first time hearing it. Sure, you could just... have a flag in the code to check or change how information is distributed... or you could have people go make sandwiches through most of the main story's cutscenes. Fortunately, this story does lead up to a lovely final confrontation, and I would not hesitate to say that the final boss gauntlet of TotK is the best in the series. Considering that BotW has the worst, I'd certainly call that a victory. Ganondorf puts up a true, genuine fight, especially to someone who hasn't been upgrading their armor. It's a great finale... but it's not enough to lift my tremendous shroud of negativity.
Beyond my initial session on the sky plateau, almost every sitting that I spent knocking out shrines and sidequests in TotK felt like a wasted day. It's not even that the shrines are bad, they're really, really not, but in completing most of them I felt nothing. It's easy to say that I should have just gotten on with the main quest, but much like in BotW, that "main" content did not thrill me any more than my shrine and sidequest meanderings. If I had stuck only to those main objectives, I would not feel that I'd had an experience worth $70 any more than I currently do. The shrines at least allowed me to revel in new mechanics, even if I ultimately concluded that they were not to my taste and that I preferred BotW's diversity.
Even with all of the obvious labor that must have gone into it, I respect TotK less than any other Zelda game. I wanted BotW to be rounded out and made whole. I wanted its annoyances smoothed out and more importantly I wanted the traditional underworld half of Zelda's design to reveal itself. I wanted big, dark, vast, ominous puzzle box dungeons like in any of the previous 3D Zeldae, maybe even with such a focus that the overworld became an afterthought. BotW could have become the overworld half of the duology while TotK became the underworld half, fully representing the whole spectrum of Zelda's appeal across two enormous, beautiful games. I wanted Zelda herself to be playable, making for a more interesting story and adding a great new twist into the gameplay. I wanted a meaningfully different story structure that put a new spin on the world and kept me guessing. BotW didn't satisfy all of my wildest dreams either, but what it gave me was so fresh and exciting, so geniusly captivating, that thinking about what could have been just feels like splitting hairs. TotK enters into a world that has already played Breath of the Wild, and I never thought that I would be able to make such a direct comparison between the two. I have made it through all of this text without even once mentioning Majora's Mask and I have done so with good reason, but let me say once, here at the end, that I could not possibly make such a comparison with the N64 duology. BotW and TotK feel very much like two games attempting the same thing, and it is entirely my belief that one of them simply does that thing better. Ocarina of Time and Majora's Mask are so spiritually and designomatically different that even when they share an engine, an asset library, and a protagonist, they are apples and oranges. Video gaming's news and marketing culture was vastly different in The Year Two Thousand, and so I had neither the time nor the critical faculties to burden Majora's Mask with the specificity of expectation that I had for TotK, but even if I had, I cannot fathom even my stupid eight-year-old childbrain responding to Majora's Mask in the way that I now respond to TotK. I am more than happy to accept a sequel on its own merits, under the power of its own strengths. I am more than happy to accept a masterful video game like Breath of the Wild, even if it isn't quite everything that I'd hoped it could be. Even when I put aside these desires, these things that I WANTED from TotK, I cannot feel that it is capable of standing on its own. TotK's strengths are simply BotW's strengths, and I'm left with what I can only see as an inferior version of a game I'd rather play for a third time, and given its almost infinite potential, coming from a series that even within the confines Link to the Past's endlessly exploitable formula has radically reinvented itself a dozen times over and produced something preciously unique at every turn...
Look. I said from the start that through BotW's inheritance alone, TotK is a decent video game. I meant that. It would also be extremely disingenuous of me to downplay what a humungous gamecrafting achievement it is to make a game this generously huge and then get it running on the Switch even half as well as this thing does. I had a good deal of fun with the shrines, and there were some cool moments sprinkled throughout the main story. I want to make certain that these things are clear, because I cannot mask the fact that my experience with TotK was drench-saturated with disappointment at every turn. The surprises that it offered me were few and unhappy. The tasks which it offered me did not spark joy, and as art it left me utterly unstirred. The fact that I could build an airplane, within a matter of hours, became no more thrilling to me than rotating a tetromino in Tetris. It's just the mechanic by which the game operates and once abandoned by its novelty it is reduced to tiresome execution. It is a game of endless half-satisfactions. It's a few hours of killer and a few hundred hours of filler, and that fills me with cyberpunk dread.
My backlog gets longer every time Aonuma utters the word "formula," because if I am to survive another winter, my cupboards must be full. Now if you will excuse me, I think maybe it's time to get into Baldur's Gate and Armored Core.
1985
Glad I played on Switch where I had an analogue stick, but yeah. Perfectly fine little shmup with a fun upgrade system.
1990
What a banger. This feels SO far ahead of its time. Interconnected world, purchasable combos of upgrades... and it looks and sounds fantastic.
Play Platinum.
Reason 1) $60 dollars.
Reason 2) The Distortion World is the only good part of Sinnoh's story and it's not here.
Reason 3) BDSP does almost nothing to fix Sinnoh's other problems.
Reason 4) The contests are worse.
Reason 5) The chibis may or may not be your thing, but the full-size battle humans look cheap and wrong and bad.
Reason 6) Platinum has randomizers and other romhacks.
Reason 7) The Battle Frontier.
Reason 8) The Poketch.
Reason 9) Shaymin/Darkrai/Arceus have ingame events you can gameshark/glitch/DNS Download your way to on your own terms, without worrying about missing them forever.
Reason 10) If you keep buying these bare minimum quality Pokemon games then there is no reason for them to improve or take any risks. Don't reward this just because it has Pokemon's unbreakable skeleton. So do all the other games you already bought.
Reason 1) $60 dollars.
Reason 2) The Distortion World is the only good part of Sinnoh's story and it's not here.
Reason 3) BDSP does almost nothing to fix Sinnoh's other problems.
Reason 4) The contests are worse.
Reason 5) The chibis may or may not be your thing, but the full-size battle humans look cheap and wrong and bad.
Reason 6) Platinum has randomizers and other romhacks.
Reason 7) The Battle Frontier.
Reason 8) The Poketch.
Reason 9) Shaymin/Darkrai/Arceus have ingame events you can gameshark/glitch/DNS Download your way to on your own terms, without worrying about missing them forever.
Reason 10) If you keep buying these bare minimum quality Pokemon games then there is no reason for them to improve or take any risks. Don't reward this just because it has Pokemon's unbreakable skeleton. So do all the other games you already bought.
1991
Takes a while to get going, but eventually does become an okay little action-puzzler. Enemy variety is such that some kind of strategy does come into play, and the mercifully infinite supply of continues minimizes the frustration that would otherwise come from accidentally trapping yourself or getting unlucky.
2018
I just spent an hour and a half on the final boss and then woke up the whole house with my victorious screams.
Auto-battle nonsense game which, like all of these, draws out a fairly unnecessary story over an excruciating amount of time. You can tell exactly when the decision came down to stop supporting KH:UX because suddenly the pace accelerates to a somewhat acceptable level.
Even as a KH fan trying to keep track of all this shit, seriously, you just do not need this. It's more of a Coded than a Union Cross. Even if these characters show up later, they will be strangers to Sora and you will be introduced to them. You can just read about them on a wiki if you're that curious.
Even as a KH fan trying to keep track of all this shit, seriously, you just do not need this. It's more of a Coded than a Union Cross. Even if these characters show up later, they will be strangers to Sora and you will be introduced to them. You can just read about them on a wiki if you're that curious.
2010
The Best One.
Difficulty on normal feels just about right, though most of the robot masters go down too easy when you're using their weakness, something that is admittedly prevalent through most of the series. 10 relies far less on ambush traps. It's very much still "Nintendo Hard" but I can't think of a single situation where something felt cheap. Mean, perhaps, but not cheap. Protoman is playable from the start which is great, though have fun taking double damage if you want to be the cool guy.
The weapons are mediocre, but frankly, if it were up to me I'd probably just remove weapons as a concept from this entire series, so I couldn't care less. The same flaw did not dampen my appreciation for 5, and I don't count it against 10 either.
To be honest with you, I knew within the first minute that I was going to like 10 more than 9 just because you can save from the level select screen. The levels have meaningfully branching paths in them! Bass is really fun to play as! They don't make you fight three Wily forms in a row without any sort of checkpoint! Try to catch me giving a shit that there's some unoriginality in the weapons that I don't like using anyway.
Difficulty on normal feels just about right, though most of the robot masters go down too easy when you're using their weakness, something that is admittedly prevalent through most of the series. 10 relies far less on ambush traps. It's very much still "Nintendo Hard" but I can't think of a single situation where something felt cheap. Mean, perhaps, but not cheap. Protoman is playable from the start which is great, though have fun taking double damage if you want to be the cool guy.
The weapons are mediocre, but frankly, if it were up to me I'd probably just remove weapons as a concept from this entire series, so I couldn't care less. The same flaw did not dampen my appreciation for 5, and I don't count it against 10 either.
To be honest with you, I knew within the first minute that I was going to like 10 more than 9 just because you can save from the level select screen. The levels have meaningfully branching paths in them! Bass is really fun to play as! They don't make you fight three Wily forms in a row without any sort of checkpoint! Try to catch me giving a shit that there's some unoriginality in the weapons that I don't like using anyway.
2008
It's far past time that we all admitted it. Inti Creates has ALWAYS been better at Megaman than Capcom ever was.
The common sentiment that I've heard is that Megaman 9 is "the best one" and while I'm not quite willing to commit to such a claim, it's absolutely in the highest tier of Classic Megaman. The only things holding it back are things consciously done to assume parity with the old games. I would rather just not repeat what I consider to be mistakes, but it does complicate the criticism somewhat when everything I can complain about is clearly intentional.
I don't think we needed to get rid of the charged shot or the slide. I don't think that there needed to be (admittedly hilarious) player traps sprinkled throughout, and I don't think the game needed to be tuned Too Hard on purpose. There are some screens in Megaman 9's Wily stages that are more satanic than anything else in the whole franchise. They are things that an experienced player CAN respond to, but even if you know what you're doing, certain things just feel like too much to ask from a player who is trying to have any kind of good time. The shop is back, which is something I've never been terribly fond of, but it's very inobtrusive here. It's mostly just a way to pile up consumable E-tanks and lives.
Megaman 9 also has a somewhat surprising amount of content, with a bunch of challenges included, some of which are... rude to even SUGGEST to the player if I'm being honest. Suggesting that somebody beat the hardest Megaman game without ever once taking damage is either going to get you laughed out of the room or make you an enabler of someone's complete self-destruction.
The common sentiment that I've heard is that Megaman 9 is "the best one" and while I'm not quite willing to commit to such a claim, it's absolutely in the highest tier of Classic Megaman. The only things holding it back are things consciously done to assume parity with the old games. I would rather just not repeat what I consider to be mistakes, but it does complicate the criticism somewhat when everything I can complain about is clearly intentional.
I don't think we needed to get rid of the charged shot or the slide. I don't think that there needed to be (admittedly hilarious) player traps sprinkled throughout, and I don't think the game needed to be tuned Too Hard on purpose. There are some screens in Megaman 9's Wily stages that are more satanic than anything else in the whole franchise. They are things that an experienced player CAN respond to, but even if you know what you're doing, certain things just feel like too much to ask from a player who is trying to have any kind of good time. The shop is back, which is something I've never been terribly fond of, but it's very inobtrusive here. It's mostly just a way to pile up consumable E-tanks and lives.
Megaman 9 also has a somewhat surprising amount of content, with a bunch of challenges included, some of which are... rude to even SUGGEST to the player if I'm being honest. Suggesting that somebody beat the hardest Megaman game without ever once taking damage is either going to get you laughed out of the room or make you an enabler of someone's complete self-destruction.
1977
Another of Sega's early mechanical wonders in the same vein as Jet Rocket. I mean look at this thing!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YedSuvlFElo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YedSuvlFElo
1993
Doom is bountiful beyond all reason. It is truly the gift that never stops giving. Its base campaign is enough as it is, and the pursuit of its mastery was a crucial element in speedrunning's infancy, but with WADs it can simply never end. Doom harbors a level editor robust enough that it has never stopped seeing heavy use. It's not even just a level editor, that's what Wolfenstein has. Doom has full-on mod support, something that was totally unheard of. Equally unheard of is deathmatch, an ONLINE PVP multiplayer mode the likes of which no shooter had seen before.
It's a fast, frenetic, inventive embarrassment of riches, the likes of which we never truly deserved.
It's a fast, frenetic, inventive embarrassment of riches, the likes of which we never truly deserved.
1991
If you've ever wondered what it takes for a game to become a sport, the answer you were looking for was Street Fighter II.
Video games had been competitive since they day they were born. Literally Space War is a one-on-one PVP multiplayer game. Pong is based on (stolen from) the Magnavox Odyssey's Table Tennis, which is based directly on an existing competitive sport. Arcades were leaderboard galleries, and almost every game in them revolved around the comparing of scores, and yet Street Fighter II was able to change everything.
Before Street Fighter II, if it was deep it was about scoremongering, and if it was actually about two people in direct, contemporaneous competition, it was a shallow thing that one or both contestants could master in no time at all.
Street Fighter II is a game that you and a friend could play every day for months on end and still develop new and interesting techniques. It was something you could study, and your rivals would constantly redefine what mastery means. Even with its many rereleases shifting its meta and smoothing over its cracks, the original release of SF2 is solid enough to remain unbroken, even in current year. It is a genre's bedrock, even if it's not so terribly exciting anymore in this world so populated by its progeny.
Video games had been competitive since they day they were born. Literally Space War is a one-on-one PVP multiplayer game. Pong is based on (stolen from) the Magnavox Odyssey's Table Tennis, which is based directly on an existing competitive sport. Arcades were leaderboard galleries, and almost every game in them revolved around the comparing of scores, and yet Street Fighter II was able to change everything.
Before Street Fighter II, if it was deep it was about scoremongering, and if it was actually about two people in direct, contemporaneous competition, it was a shallow thing that one or both contestants could master in no time at all.
Street Fighter II is a game that you and a friend could play every day for months on end and still develop new and interesting techniques. It was something you could study, and your rivals would constantly redefine what mastery means. Even with its many rereleases shifting its meta and smoothing over its cracks, the original release of SF2 is solid enough to remain unbroken, even in current year. It is a genre's bedrock, even if it's not so terribly exciting anymore in this world so populated by its progeny.
1982
I grew up playing Smash TV on, of all things, my PS1 (via Arcade Party Pak) and little did I know that almost everything I liked about it was already on full display in the arcade a decade before I was born.