“Yesss! Let’s disable the four locks and get into that lab!
Sounds kinda video-gamey when you say it out loud, huh?”
-Nemona Pokemon.

I don’t fucking care about graphics nor glitches. It’s the type of thing that you see and forget about 5 minutes afterwards. I didn’t care about them in cyberpunk and I don’t care about them here. It’s true that demanding that the company with the biggest gaming franchise in the world do better it’s the right thing to do, but c’mon man, if that’s the only thing you have to say about this and other games then you don’t care much about the medium as you say.
That being said, this game sucks ass.

The last Pokemon game I played to completion was Moon, so I don’t know about Sword and the other games in between, but I’m gonna pretend they don’t exist for this review.
The main problem with this game is also the problem I had with other recent releases from other franchises (SMTV, Elden Ring…) but I think this one here is the worst of them all.
It’s the open world thing. It’s a very sad thing that this is the norm now.
My main gripe with this new approach is that it’s supposed to give you ‘freedom’, but in reality, while being true that you can go anywhere you want (not that much though), the game openly reveals the points of interests you need to know, and in a very open-worldy fashion, becomes rigidly structured. You can do A, B, C or B, C, A, but that’s it, it’ll never allow itself to divert from that. It becomes a checking boxes simulator with stealth and crafting. Just beat 8 leaders, 5 paradoxes and 5 star members, collect shit and get the ending. It’s just the open world way man, you’ll never understand…
All the tera stuff is pointless, in combat, in raids, in minibosses. The paradox bosses, gym tests and team star bases were boring as fuck, the last two are specially jarring because the pre-gym dungeon/team bases were the most fun part of the series for me, and they replaced it with mini-games.
Let’s not forget about the difficulty, since I feel that the series became a bit too easy the past few gens. I would say that it’s all over the place with spikes and all but you can also make your own path here, so maybe it’s my fault in some way. But it’s also true that the game makes no attempt to adjust itself to the path you choose, it doesn’t need automatic level scaling, that would suck, but for example: very early in the game you get to choose between two doors, east and west, but when you do so, instead of leveling up the path you did not take, they leave it as it is, and when you reach there you wipe everything instantly and it kills all the hype of those bosses. And do not tell me that you can beat one gym and take the other door; you probably can, but it’s still a very boring alternative imo (and even nurse joy tells you to keep going the way you were, but that system just works like shit). I’ll say that the boss battles that are around your level are pretty fun, but they were rare in this long game, mostly the late game stuff.
Open world ruins everything. Trainer battles became glorified normal encounters most of the time. The UI is hell, especially the map. The world itself feels like a minecraft server with towny, this is not a jab towards the graphics, it’s a design issue, I just can’t explain further, just look at the world with that thought in your mind and you’ll see. And populating the world are the pokemon, that look like mmo monsters walking around their spawn spots. Compared to the old, invisible random encounters, seeing them in the overworld makes them less special, it strips the encounters from the surprise, and finding the rarer forms stops feeling special; your mind used to fill in the gaps and all that. At first thought they were going to go with a bugsnax-style approach for the mon hunting, but outside of the occasional wigglet, just throw a ball at them and fight, that’s all. And sometimes you will accidentally step on a microscopic pokemon with your giant koraidon, starting a battle. Random encounters, please come back. I need you baby.
The only thing that redeems such an empty feeling world, is the characters themselves. I love their designs and, while still being unidimensional asf, they successfully managed to give a feeling that they like to be around each other. They carry this game’s world. Director Clavell is GOD. I really like the team star storyline, love what they tried to do there.
But yeah I hated this most of the time. I can’t wait for Palworld, that’s gonna rock.

tl;dr si hubieran puesto el juego acá en burzaco en lugar de españa hubiera sido bueno

What a brilliant mess this game is. Breath of the Wild, when it came out, felt like a flawless jewel. You could complain (and I did!) about how weapon durability disincentivized engaging with the combat, or bemoan the relative weakness of the dungeons, but those were all gripes around the edges of the monumental fact that they had near-perfectly delivered on the promise that open world games had been making for decades. It was reacting to the larger world of video games in a way Nintendo largely refused to do, and at the same time it was like nothing we'd seen before.

Tears of the Kingdom is very much like something we've seen before. The core conceit is identical to its predecessor despite the different array of magical abilities, and even the plot is largely unchanged: Zelda is gone, again. The great evil is back, again. Climb the towers, find the shrines, do the dungeons, save the princess.

But to see this as just more Breath of the Wild is also to miss the point. The first game was constrained by its immaculate crystalline structure. It had to be the open-world game. Tears of the Kingdom could never be that because that's already been done, and it uses the extra freedom of the younger sibling to get weird with it.

In a lot of ways, this weirdness isn't for the best. The control scheme is onerous to say the least, particularly when engaging with the construction mechanics. The combat scaling is way off, with enemies either taking ten hits from a top-tier weapon or dying immediately. Once you get a feel for the patterns in the depths, they're largely empty and repetitive.

But damn if it isn't also interesting. The truth I keep coming back to is this: although I think Breath of the Wild is a "better" game in some abstract design sense, I lost interest after about 100 hours. Meanwhile, I've spent twice that playing Tears of the Kingdom and I'd be happy to continue if only there weren't more games to get around to.

This game takes huge swings, and while not all of them hit the ones that do are incredible. You only have to glance online to see the videos of mechs and drones players have built. The depths feel genuinely terrifying. Fusion is fully brilliant, simultaneously solving durability and making room for countless moments of discovery. There are genuinely good boss fights for maybe the first time in any Zelda game.

And I could rhapsodize endlessly about the way the world interconnects with itself. To my mind, the only real justification for the concept of "open world" is the idea that your actions as a player have non-local effects on the world you exist in. Breath of the Wild gestured at this, but Tears of the Kingdom fully embraces it. Conversations continue across the map from one another as NPCs wander from place to place. Refugees you meet in one region return home to another as you rebuild their houses. The world feels alive in a way that games seldom attempt and almost never achieve, and I love it for that.

Even though its references are obvious at first glance and more obvious once you start playing, Tunic doesn’t feel at all like any of them. And contrary to what you might think, that’s a bad thing. Let me explain.

Yes, it plays like a Zelda, and Zelda 1 has been referenced many, many times by other texts for obvious reasons like the lack of gimmicky dungeons, the hidden secrets, the apparent simplicity of the gameplay… it even tries to replicate the experience of playing with a manual and taking notes in order to progress and have a better understanding of the whole thing. But it fails so miserably. The world is over-designed, abusing connections between locations, teleports, save points… The sense of discovery and adventure vanishes when there’s hardly any sense danger except for bosses and occasional fights and, in case of trouble, you will respawn in the latest save point activated (which by the way you can use even when surrounded by enemies) so there’s virtually no loss of progress.

Tunic also never gets close to the feeling of having to figure the hell out of your path in order to your destination. There’s no hidden doors or passages that are necessary to progress through any of the dungeons or important locations, all the layouts are straight forward and it ends up feeling more like a modern Zelda just without puzzles to solve. Instead, there’s always locked doors with a handle next to it and at most you’ll have to fight a bunch of minions or reach it from a different place because the path is locked. What’s most worrying for me, though, is the fact that even if the dungeons themselves don’t have puzzles or gimmicks in the traditional sense (except for one that I can recall), the world itself is built around those gimmicks in a really gamey, artificial manner, hiding rewards and blocking your progress behind unreachable places if you don’t have the necessary items or power ups like the hook or the dash.

You'll also see people talk about Dark souls but honestly at this point it seems like a joke to me that people think of the game when something has stamina, bosses and bonfire-like save points. FEZ has been said to be closer to what Tunic wants to dobut this is not as mystic, magical, obtuse, imaginative, with its craziest puzzles and challenges being better integrated into the world, less gamey. For instance, both the famous Golden Path and the mechanism to activate the mysterious monoliths and doors spread throughout the world (by following a sequence of d-pad presses that have no other utility, quite underwhelming) are revealed in the manual at some point. Which brings me to the next point: why is it there in the first place? What sense does it make in the context of the game and its world? What’s fun about having pages giving you hints or sometimes really clear explanations about where you are, where to go, how its systems work, which buttons do what, how to perform certain actions or where to find things? Wasn’t the point to explore a mystical world with lots of secrets to find and emulate the old experience of exchanging information with other people, taking notes, having to figure out things… ? And why is it both in our language and the game’s language, emulating a lost manuscript that you have to gather by exploring and overcoming challenges, in a way that doesn’t feel natural at all? The point of having a manual is being able to understand it, the point of having old manuscripts is not being able to understand them, but this in-between with words written in both languages, plus the bland foreshadowing, button mappings and game system explanations, handy little hints every once in a while etc just doesn't make any sense.

But there’s great stuff like The Quarry. Everything about that zone, from its perspective-shifting presentation (very cinematic) showing the giant door you have to reach. The place is full of enemies who attack you from different ranges and heights and show different behaviours when you approach them. They all gather around corruption, some weird purple-ish liquid that’s either just there or emanating from ancient monoliths, and that corruption shrinks your health bar (yes, your health bar, not your hp) making you play safer, experiment with the different items and power ups, manage the distances and so-on. Everything’s cool except for the existence of certain item that grants invulnerability to corruption unless you touch it. It was too good to be true.