A whole year already? Maybe the wait for the next one won’t be as bad as I thought.

Look, this is up there with the games I’ve talked the most about already, there’s so many things about it that I love and so many things about it that I can’t stress how much I despise. But given this game is still very important to me, I figured it was worth putting my updated thoughts out there (with the caveat that I have not actually played the game since my near-100% playthrough one year ago).

I’m gonna say the quiet part out loud that so many others seem scared to admit: Tears of the Kingdom was a disappointment. It did not live up to Breath of the Wild or its own series legacy, and most disappointingly of all, it is one of the worst sequels I have ever played. None of this is to imply that the game is bad, and honestly, that’s part of what frustrates me about this game so much. It pisses me off so much all while still having the gall to be, almost undeniably, a really good game in its own right. But I think we’re at a point where we just need to admit that this game was not nearly as good as it could have been or as it should have been.

When the game came out, I said that the story was better than Breath of the Wild’s. I no longer agree with this. In fact, the more I think about it, the more I feel that it’s actually quite significantly worse. For as much as I disliked BotW’s story structure, the story was built around that structure, it wouldn’t have made sense any other way. TotK’s story feels retrofitted to that structure, and so nearly every player will watch chronological events completely out of order. It’s got a singular great moment, but even that is completely undone by the time you reach the ending.

The dungeons I still feel pretty similarly about, which is to say that I believe they are better than Breath of the Wild’s but still far below the standard set by Zelda games of the past. I can articulate my disappointment better now though. Every individual puzzle is good, but they all feel incredibly disconnected from each other. There’s no through-line, no consideration of multiple elements working together at the same time, no logical sense of progression, because the developers feel that being able to approach these in whatever way you want is more important than any of that. I have to wholeheartedly disagree.

And this leads into a more general point I have on the design philosophy of this game. Freedom made Breath of the Wild exciting. The exploration and appreciation of Hyrule was front and center, with dungeons being secondary pieces. I wish they had made the dungeons more important, but fine. It fits with the game’s vision. However, the most critical flaw with Tears of the Kingdom is that its priorities are completely unbalanced.

Let me explain: Tears of the Kingdom approaches freedom in a completely different way. Instead of searching out what you want to do, you get to decide how to do it. BotW dipped its toes into this pool but TotK dives in head first. That’s why you have these incredible abilities that I still think are a remarkable technical achievement. However, if they were going to shift directions like that, they needed to change up much more than they did in every other area.

That goes for the dungeons like I mentioned, but more damning to me is the fact that this game is completely toothless in how it handles Breath of the Wild’s world. Everything is damn near identical, with extra additions in the sky and depths coming off as supplementary and relatively unnecessary. Where are the towns? Where are the interesting memorable locations? They’re on the surface level, and nowhere else. So the vast majority of the content is in the same space as it was in the map from the previous game.

Don’t get me wrong, BotW’s Hyrule is incredible, but it is a map built for exploration and discovery. It is NOT a map teeming with unique content or interesting ways to use all the new mechanics in play. So if you try to play TotK like you would BotW, focused on exploring Hyrule, you’ll almost certainly be disappointed by the lack of changes. I think it’s fair to expect more significant changes than a town being covered by mushrooms or sludge this time around.

Because this world was not designed with these mechanics in mind, things get extremely repetitive extremely quickly. Many can attest to giving up on being creative as soon as they discovered the popular hoverbike technique, but even as somebody who never saw that, I also began using the same copy/paste techniques over and over throughout my playthrough. The more time you spend with this game, you realize how little you’re actually encouraged to use the mechanics that everyone loves so much. It’s not even fun in a sandbox sense because there’s no sense of permanence to your creations whatsoever. Why bother being creative when it’ll disappear the moment you want to go do something else?

The game is a lot better when you gun it to each major quest objective and try not to explore much, but that’s insane to me because the vast majority of content in this game is completely optional. In a game that took me 130 hours on my first playthrough, it’s inexcusable that I’m sitting here saying I regret at least 100 of those hours. There is so much unnecessary fluff in this game, more than any other game I’ve ever played. The shrines are admittedly quite fun, but I can only take so many mini-challenges when there’s so few chances to exercise these mechanics in a properly demanding environment.

It’s so frustrating to imagine that all of these problems could have been solved with an entirely new environment. I had so much fun with the opening island because it seemed like it was going to be everything I wanted from this game! But as we all discovered one year ago today, the rest of the game wasn’t like that first island. I don’t mind the Breath of the Wild formula, but I do mind how lazily it was reused here. These games will NEVER work with repeated maps, and this game was the ultimate proof of that.

Tears of the Kingdom is a good game because Breath of the Wild was a good game. It has a great open world, great mechanics, great atmosphere (even if it is a bit worse now that all the towns are uglier), etc. But it is NOT a good sequel. It blatantly reuses elements without considering how they would be recontextualized with the new mechanical focus. Its new additions content wise are lackluster at best. And because of this it is completely unable to separate itself from its predecessor in a way that every Zelda prior has done with flying colors, even the direct sequels. Hearing this game compared to something like Majora’s Mask is legitimately insulting.

Having had my thoughts develop over the course of the last year, I have come to the unfortunate conclusion that this is my least favorite 3D Zelda, despite everything it has going for it. Nintendo should know to do better. We should know that Zelda deserves better.

When I was in middle school, this was very rapidly becoming one of my favorite games, and I would play the mobile port any chance I got. Eventually it got to a point where every day after school I would do one no save run of the game. Most days I wouldn’t finish. I only ever made it to the end of the game one time, and I remember vividly how great it felt.

But even then, I was aware of how much easier the mobile port was due to things like widescreen support, smoother framerate, no pit of death, etc. I always wondered how people playing on Genesis ever made it through the game with no save files.

Well tonight I booted up Sonic 2 through the Mega Collection on GameCube to see how 16-bit games look on a CRT, and I was just having so much fun with the game that test run quickly evolved into a full playthrough. I still get really tense around the final levels. But I did it: all on the original version, no save states.

This probably isn’t impressive to most people reading this, but I wanted to leave this accomplishment here as a monument to all the time I sunk into this game as a kid. I love this game so much.

It’s a guilty pleasure idc, Sonic with a sword is cool af and I won’t pretend otherwise

Gameplay wise this is perfectly competent at best, mediocre at worst, I find it mindless fun honestly. But the reason I love this game definitely isn’t the gameplay… this is the end of an era in many ways. The last game to have Crush 40 on the soundtrack, the last game with the best voice cast Sonic has ever had, and the last game to genuinely take itself seriously. It’s the embodiment of everything missing from the soul of the series today and it’s got a surprisingly good story, won’t blow your mind but it’s very heartfelt especially at the end.

One of the coolest final bosses in the series btw and arguably the best selection of vocal tracks

This will probably sound very silly to MMO fans who are used to expansions of this scale, but to me this felt much more like a sequel than a DLC. New areas, new jobs, entirely new story, new dungeons, new everything, it's all a pretty incredible scale. It's almost a running joke in the FFXIV community that Heavensward is where the game finally "gets good," but having finalyl experienced it for myself I have to say I agree! This is a significant step up from A Realm Reborn in every way.

The story is probably the most staggering improvement. ARR was a slow build that was more focused on developing Eorzea than it was any of its characters, a move that I personally feel was the right one given the live service nature of XIV in general. You're going to be spending LOTS of time in this world regardless, so having that early space to really flesh it out and make it believable worked for me, even if that plot was largely lacking in stakes.

By the time we arrive in Heavensward though, all of the core worldbuilding is out of the way and so we finally start seeing legitimately interesting developments. Characters are challenged in new ways, stakes are high, and on top of it all we're still seeing more and more of this beautiful world they've created.

The new areas in this expansion sweep everything I've come to know from ARR. They're significantly bigger, not split up into loading zones, and just generally way more interesting from both a design and visual standpoint. Dungeons now all feel important as they are smartly tied into key points of the main narrative. Bosses are a huge step up as well in terms of spectacle and mechanics.

Even as I have yet to tackle the patch quests that were added post release, I've really enjoyed my time with Heavensward, I'm really starting to understand why this game is as acclaimed as it is and I look forward to seeing where the story takes me next. I'm not sure this will ever be peak FF to me like it is to so many others, but I can absolutely appreciate what the game is going for and I have tons of respect for it.