The ending was really good. I like the story concepts. Ganondorf's speech at the climax that gave depth and compelling motivation to his character hit hard.
"I coveted that wind, I suppose" unironically goes so hard and will not live in my head rent free.

The gameplay and stuff is fine. The dungeons are not as good as ocarina. Exploration and stuff is cool. Lots of issues though.

OoT > BoTW > WW

Time to Play: 40 hours 24 minutes

Played Project Restoration Patch on Citra.

I really liked this game. The vibe of everything combined with the interesting mechanics and the stories and the characters and the themes. It was all just great.

The one moment that really sold me on it, more than anything else was the side quest with Anju and Kafei. Once I helped Kafei get the mask, I immediately song of soared my way back to clock town and went to Anju's room to see their reunion. I waited... as the moon began to come crashing down, I regretted my decision to use song of soaring. I felt this dread, like maybe I messed up, maybe I was supposed to help him on his way back, what if this is some fucked up tragic end where Kafei dies on his way back because I didn't choose to help him. I sat there, with Anju, waiting and hoping that Kafei could make it back in time, so that these two lovers could just fucking be together. The moment when Kafei opened the door, I was so relieved. I watched as they came together and the symbol of their love, their happiness, the couple's mask was given to me. And then they say they will stay there... because they are together now they don't care about the moon overhead, not that they can do a damn thing about it anyway, so they just want to stay in each others arms for a little while longer.

Regrettably, I can do nothing but reverse time, undoing all the progress I helped make in these two's relationship. All of it was meaningless, either I undid their time together, or it's a multiverse type of time travel and they died regardless of my actions. It was pointless. All pointless...

Except it's not. I still have the mask. The symbol that their love existed, that it was real, that it was meaningful, that their happiness and union did in fact exist. This mask was the proof of that. The proof that even if the moon came crashing down and wiped it all away, it did exist. It did exist. It was meaningful, it was right, it was true.

All these thoughts swirled in my head after completing this quest and I couldn't get it out of my head for the next day.

You can say I'm over analyzing a children's game and fuck yes I am. But it's what it made me think about. That's just one of the moments I loved about this game.

There are moments like that throughout the game, and granted this moment was the most powerful for me, it's a constant throughout the story. From a mother waiting till her dying moments to hear about her missing son, to two asshole pieces of shit deeply caring about their brother, to a crying child desperate for his father's voice.

That's not even getting into the other stuff I thoroughly enjoyed about this game. Despite the dark tone throughout the game, it also maintains this whimsical child like fantasy vibe that reminds me of a story like the phantom tollbooth, the image of the goofy giants holding up a screaming moon looks like something the director's child drew one day and they were like "brilliant write that down!" and the aesthetic of the fantasy shit is just gorgeous. I love the look of Majora's mask, and all the bosses really. All the dungeons look fantastic as well. I particularly enjoyed the water dungeon and stone temple's aesthetic.

The dungeons are great. I really like the design of the dungeons. IDK if they were better than Ocarina's but i liked them more than windwakers.

The transformation mechanic is fun. Goron rolling, zora swimming, deku hopping, it's all just a vibe.

Now, I have some minor issues that are so minor I'm struggling to even remember them, but small gripes that hindered the experience from being 10/10 amazing. One of them was how ridiculously easy and honestly, boring, mechanically that the final boss was. While the vibes of the fight were fucking amazing, it was vastly mechanically inferior to both Windwaker and Ocarina's bosses, which sucks because I really liked the aesthetic of the fight. Ocarina still has the best final boss fight lol.

Current Zelda ranking: MM > OoT > BotW > WW

There are many things about this game I really like. There was a moment when I was playing the game, namely right after the pirate ship dungeon, when I genuinely thought I might like it more than both Ocarina of time and Breath of the Wild. The dungeons are all just so fucking good man. I love them. My favorite one being ancient cistern. It's just got fucking everything man. Then you have one of the best items in the series with the beetle which is probably one of the best if not the best item in the zelda series, only beaten out by the shekaih slates stasis if we count those abilities as "items." Groose is great. I overall really like the story. Then you have ghiraham who is just such a fun character. Then you have the final fight with demise, which is cinematic and bad ass as all hell, perhaps the best final boss fight in the series (though I have to go back and fight majora the regular way to properly assess that boss). Though I do also feel like he would've been greatly benefited from a third phase. The final line about his hatred coming back in a cyclical nature leading to future zelda games is interesting as all hell.

But then... the stuff that's not that... Holy shit the moment when they were hyping up the triforce as able to be found soon on skyloft only for you to have to go back to the locations for A THIRD ASS TIME AFTER THE SACRED FLAMES FOR SONG PIECES just absolutely killed the momentum of the backhalf of the game for me. Even worse that 2/3 of the challenges for the song pieces are just... not good... The only good one is the thunder dragon one. The stealth section one with all your shit stolen and the fucking water song finding challenge were just... not fun. I was so ready for those things to just be fucking over with. The water flooding is a cool concept I guess, but it's not the type of shit I want to be doing 25 hours into the game as the final road block to the climax of the story. I was fine with the sacred flame shit because it all was engaging. Minus the final flame which was the beginning of the end because that fucking terrible escort mission. Fuck that. I got stuck on the final section because I ran out of fucking arrows. I hated that and it didn't need to be in the game.

Then there are also some fundamental missteps in the design approach to the game. Namely in how so empty and disconnected the flying feels from the overworld and actually interesting game content. It's just so weird compared to windwaker's sailing. While flying in this game is infinitely more engaging than windwaker's sailing because of the increased complexity of inputs required to even you know go forward, there is just... so fucking little to actually fly too. YOU DON'T EVEN GET THE ABILITY TO FIGHT OR DEFEND YOURSELF IN THE SKY (the spin attack) UNTIL 25 HOURS INTO THE GAME. WHAT THE FUCK. The skyworld needed way more to do. What is currently there just ain't it. The windwaker's world is miles ahead by every possible metric.

Oh yeah, Fi was very boring and annoying as a character. Their goodbye didn't really work for me until I thought of the goodbye as not "Fi" saying goodbye but "the master sword," which made it click much more for me.

One of the other metrics of enjoyment I had from playing this game though was seeing "the final traditional 3d zelda" and seeing how some stuff, like the stamina wheel, that got brought over to breath of the wild, while also seeing how some stuff are as far from breath of the wild as can be, like forcing you to do chores before you can beat the final boss. If I had played the zelda games in a normal ass order maybe I could say more interesting stuff about the progression of zelda games though lol.

Overall, I really like the game, definitely less than ocarina. I'm unsure how much I like it less than botw though, because while botw has much higher highs, it also suffers from critical flaws that prevent it from being as great as ocarina or majora's in my eyes.

MM > OoT > BotW > SS > WW

I would like to play twilight princess before tears of the kingdom but since it comes out in 4 days that's probably not happening and I'm good with taking a break from 3d zelda's after tears of the kingdom given that I've binged nearly all of them within 2 months lol.

(I didn't talk about motion controls because I played on aswitch emulator with button controls, which was surprisingly fine. I probably would've liked the game even more with motion controls because of how it would've added to immersion but I sadly do not own a wii.)

After 125 hours, doing 144/152 shrines, exploring a significant portion of the depths, and doing a large number of the side quests throughout the game, I can solidly say that Tears of the Kingdom is a game I thoroughly enjoyed with some major disappointments that prevent me from screaming "Mastapiece!" from the rooftops from all to hear. There are an infinite number of smaller complaints that I can go over in exhaustive detail, but the real crux of the issue for me comes down to 2.5 major complaints.

The first one is that tears of the kingdom's world is not better enough from breath of the wilds to make re-exploring it a mind blowingly amazing experience like it was for breath of the wild. There are only 2 times when it truly captured that feeling for me, and these moments were met by an opposite disappointment when I realized that there was less depth than I initially thought there would be.

I am talking about the first time you descend from the sky to the great sky island, and the first time you go into the depths. Both of these moments were absolutely magical, spiritual, wondrous, moments for me. I explored both the skies and the depths for a long while with the same feeling of exploration that botw gave, but... it doesn't last because only really made a handful of content in these areas.

(Problem 1a) The depths is one biome that looks the same spread out across a large large large large map that is not so secretly a clever reuse of the already existing over world map. NOT to say that it isn't fun. I played in the depths for a long ass time. Finding the central abandoned mine was glorious... but then you realize... that kind of was the coolest thing to find in the depths (besides main story stuff and boss rematches).

The minor exception to this, the lava section of the depths, was cool, I guess.

(Problem 1b) THE NON MAIN STORY SKY ISLANDS ARE ALL COPY AND PASTED THE SAME 5 DIFFERENT ISLAND WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK NINTENDO. This is by far the biggest disappointment I had while playing. When I realized this, it literally took a whole ass point off my rating of the game. It's so fucking disappointing that the great sky island is the peak of sky islands design.

AND I SAY THIS AS SOMEONE WHO ENJOYS THE SKY ISLAND PUZZLES. There was this one island I can recall early on in my playthrough where you had to do a little puzzle involving recall and ultrahand to drain a pond to get a chest. That island is the only design I can recall that didn't get repeated over and over and over and over. Maybe it's my fault for not going to all the smaller islands that are a blip on the map and can't be seen unless you are scouting them out with superman vision, but regardless, the biggest islands are all copy and paste, and that's such a major bumper. If there had been unique islands to find outside of the main story, that would've been dope as fuck and made exploring them infinitely more fun.

(Problem 1.5) Besides side quests, I wish there was a major missable dungeon or thing to find. Something like Elden Ring's optional legacy dungeons.

Now my second issue, they don't go far enough with the puzzles. There are some amazing puzzles that require actual thought from the player, but there are so many shrines and dungeon puzzles where I was like, come the fuck on. You had a great thing going here, you could make a whole ass dungeon out of this (a long one), but the game director or whatever must've put a time cap on how long shrines can be so we got this short little shrine that doesn't do the concept enough justice.

On the bright side, the actual mechanics are much more fun to engage than BotW with even when it's easy because of the freedom and creativity it allots.

To be anti-negative for a second, I've seen people saying the shrine solutions are still too obvious and therefore not good puzzles, but I just played the previous 3D zelda games, and most of the dungeons in those games have extremely obvious solutions to their dungeon puzzlesbut no one says shit about those games not being Zelda enough. Cough Windwaker Cough I like the puzzles although they aren't as mind challenging as IDK the Portal Reloaded mod (Portal adjacent stuff are some of the only puzzle games I've played lol)

Problem 2.5 is my major disappointment with the dungeons, which I largely liked, but are far too short and were absolutely nothing like traditional zelda dungeons. They could easily make a traditional long zelda dungeon with these mechanics and it could be among the best in the series. But they just don't want to do that with TotK I guess and that's a shame, especially if this is the only time we get these abilities in a game.

Overall, I have some more minor criticisms that are major for other people (like enemy variety is better but still not great). IDC about weapon durability. I think it works well for it's intended purpose.

MInor major criticism is that the difficulty scaling in this whole ass game sucks ass still. I stopped upgrading my health pool at ~15 hearts, never upgraded armor, avoiding spamming health (limited myself to 2 meals per fight max), and turning off sages. It feels bad that I have to run a challenge run to make the game at all challenging.

Now for positive shit:
I like the story.
Love Ganondorf.
Depths/Sky islands/Overworld gameplay loop compained with Ultrahand and zonai devices is great.
The FINAL SECTION OF THE GAME IS FUCKING GLORIOUS. From finding dragonhead island, to the spirit temple, to... (skip the mid mecha sequence), to the glorious ganondorf final battle, to that epic dragon riding climax. Definitely my top 1 final battle for Zelda games (Majora's mask final battle w/o fierce deity mask still pending though).
I love the abilities so much man. Ultrahand, Ascend, Recall, and the way they just play off of each other so fucking perfectly is just so good.
I love the side quests, they really add a lot to the world that botw was severely lacking.
The bosses (main story and all the mini bosses) are cool.
Phantom Ganon and Gleeoks are peak.
I like the Shrines.
Gloom is a great mechanic that kind of actually makes healing limiting in some way by requiring you to pay attention to prepping meals.

Back to being slightly negative I guess. The worst thing I can say about Tears of the Kingdom is that, I am glad, or should I say hopeful, that this will be the only breath of the wild sequel and that I am excited for what's next. Sure, I have no doubt the future 3D Zelda's will be open world still. I have my concerns about what feedback they will actually consider for their next Zelda, but this game was so so unbelievably close (despite being so far) to being the perfect open world Zelda game. Seeing what new direction they take from here, hell even if it's just a new open world, is exciting as fuck.

If I had my wish, I would beg the Zelda team to look at a game like Outer Wilds which has a similar philosophy to what the Zelda team seems to want for Zelda in terms of freedom and exploration, but it's such a smaller map with an infinitely more curated experience. Then I would beg them to consider restricting the player's freedom more in spaces like dungeons, like they do in Shrines. (I could write a whole ass thing about how Zelda might be pushing up on the limits of what is possible with open world game design while still retaining the identity as a Zelda game, but IDK).

Overall, it hurts me to say it since I wanted for TotK to be the best Zelda yet, but TotK is just an 8/10 for me. It didn't come particularly close to Majora's Mask for me. In spite of the side quests being improved, there is nothing like the Couple Mask Side quest, or just... everything about that game honestly. I don't know whether I can fairly compare it to OoT since they're so different. OoT is much more tightly made... but I did play Tears for nearly 10x more.... but I don't think I can put Tears over OoT when it has so many flaws that hold it back while OoT pretty much made a whole ass new genre...

Current Zelda Ranking (Pre-Twilight Princess):
MM > OoT > TotK > BotW (pre-TotK) > SS > WW > BotW (post-TotK)