Tears of the Kingdom is a really weird game to talk about, because I feel like I should enjoy it a lot more than I do. I ended up playing the game for 150 hours, I ended up getting all the shrines (though definitely not 100%ing...), but I don't know that I fully enjoyed those 150 hours. There was a lot of the game that was just downtime where I was going through the motions, and it was never straight up unenjoyable, but I also don't know if I'd say that the game has 150 hours worth of content - rather that's just how long it took me to go through it.
I feel like ToTK 's content gets less interesting as you play through it. Exploring the depths was fun at the start, when fog busting was novel and it hadn't gotten tedious yet, but it got tedious by the end of the game. While there are vehicles you can use, all it does is make boring content go by faster, as there's very little interesting to discover in the depths. It's basically just currency to upgrade your battery, armor you're never going to use, and resources. It overstayed its welcome. The same can be said of exploring the sky. It was novel at first, and then the sheer amount of copy pasted islands with similar puzzles got a little tiring. Even the labyrinths suffer from the same problem. The first time I found one, and explored it from start to finish, I was amazed. It was a super novel experience. And then all three are formated the exact same way, which eats away at how interesting it was to explore them.
Building stuff was interesting in theory, but in practice I found it took way too long. You could use autobuild, but even that isn't perfect since you needed to either spend zonite or take the parts out of your inventory ahead of time, which was a little tedious. Building anything new took forever, too. The time between finding a solution, and actually executing that solution, was too long. A lot of the time I just found myself finding other ways to travel (gliding, spamming the same plane model, horse) rather than building anything novel. That aside, I don't like that it allows you to clear puzzles in such a wide variety of probably not intended ways. The feeling of "Eh, definitely not the intended solution, but good enough." is just not one that I actually enjoy, especially when that solution is so often "just use a rocket/just use a generic fan + control stick vehicle/just build a long stick or bridge."
Combat is just as fundamentally broken as it was in Breath of the Wild. I enjoy it more, because I don't feel like it's a dark hole of resources I'll never get back thanks to the fusion system, but Zelda combat should just not be about RPG numbers, at least defensively. Offensively it's mostly fine since they mix in goobers alongside the big boys, so you still get to feel yourself becoming more powerful, but defensively it's just ridiculous. You can just upgrade the hylian set for nearly no materials and just... take no damage from enemies. And conversely, it means that whenever you're wearing something other than your hylian set, you take a ton of damage, more than is probably reasonable. And since it takes forever to upgrade armor outside the hylian set, I just end up not bothering. Hell, a lot of the utility ones barely feel like they matter. The one that lets you climb in the rain barely feels like it does everything, even with the full set.
Shrines were OK. Not much to say about them, there was a lot of them, most of them had creative ideas, but they were often too short to scratch the same itch as a dungeon would. Likewise, I don't really care for the dungeons in this game. I liked the approach and build up to the dungeons almost universally more than I enjoyed the dungeons themselves. The Divine Beast style of just finding 5 things then going back to the central room to fight the boss just isn't interesting to me. At least there's more variety aesthetically than there was with divine beasts.
Story wise, it feels like the game is being held back by the way that the game is set up. The story can be found out of order when it comes to stuff like Zelda's tears or the master sword, and then conversely they're so obsessed with the idea that they have to make sure you get the story in order-ish that the cutscenes for all temples are copy pated. It's not a bad story, I like it conceptually, I like elements of it, but I hate how it's told because of the open world nature of the game.
All in all, TOTK is just a really weird game for me. I had a really good time early on, and while it never fully lost its steam (I still completed it), I also feel like I'd have enjoyed it more if I just ended the game early rather than actually going for all shrines and map completion. There was just a lot of the time where I was coasting through the game rather than fully enjoying myself.
I feel like ToTK 's content gets less interesting as you play through it. Exploring the depths was fun at the start, when fog busting was novel and it hadn't gotten tedious yet, but it got tedious by the end of the game. While there are vehicles you can use, all it does is make boring content go by faster, as there's very little interesting to discover in the depths. It's basically just currency to upgrade your battery, armor you're never going to use, and resources. It overstayed its welcome. The same can be said of exploring the sky. It was novel at first, and then the sheer amount of copy pasted islands with similar puzzles got a little tiring. Even the labyrinths suffer from the same problem. The first time I found one, and explored it from start to finish, I was amazed. It was a super novel experience. And then all three are formated the exact same way, which eats away at how interesting it was to explore them.
Building stuff was interesting in theory, but in practice I found it took way too long. You could use autobuild, but even that isn't perfect since you needed to either spend zonite or take the parts out of your inventory ahead of time, which was a little tedious. Building anything new took forever, too. The time between finding a solution, and actually executing that solution, was too long. A lot of the time I just found myself finding other ways to travel (gliding, spamming the same plane model, horse) rather than building anything novel. That aside, I don't like that it allows you to clear puzzles in such a wide variety of probably not intended ways. The feeling of "Eh, definitely not the intended solution, but good enough." is just not one that I actually enjoy, especially when that solution is so often "just use a rocket/just use a generic fan + control stick vehicle/just build a long stick or bridge."
Combat is just as fundamentally broken as it was in Breath of the Wild. I enjoy it more, because I don't feel like it's a dark hole of resources I'll never get back thanks to the fusion system, but Zelda combat should just not be about RPG numbers, at least defensively. Offensively it's mostly fine since they mix in goobers alongside the big boys, so you still get to feel yourself becoming more powerful, but defensively it's just ridiculous. You can just upgrade the hylian set for nearly no materials and just... take no damage from enemies. And conversely, it means that whenever you're wearing something other than your hylian set, you take a ton of damage, more than is probably reasonable. And since it takes forever to upgrade armor outside the hylian set, I just end up not bothering. Hell, a lot of the utility ones barely feel like they matter. The one that lets you climb in the rain barely feels like it does everything, even with the full set.
Shrines were OK. Not much to say about them, there was a lot of them, most of them had creative ideas, but they were often too short to scratch the same itch as a dungeon would. Likewise, I don't really care for the dungeons in this game. I liked the approach and build up to the dungeons almost universally more than I enjoyed the dungeons themselves. The Divine Beast style of just finding 5 things then going back to the central room to fight the boss just isn't interesting to me. At least there's more variety aesthetically than there was with divine beasts.
Story wise, it feels like the game is being held back by the way that the game is set up. The story can be found out of order when it comes to stuff like Zelda's tears or the master sword, and then conversely they're so obsessed with the idea that they have to make sure you get the story in order-ish that the cutscenes for all temples are copy pated. It's not a bad story, I like it conceptually, I like elements of it, but I hate how it's told because of the open world nature of the game.
All in all, TOTK is just a really weird game for me. I had a really good time early on, and while it never fully lost its steam (I still completed it), I also feel like I'd have enjoyed it more if I just ended the game early rather than actually going for all shrines and map completion. There was just a lot of the time where I was coasting through the game rather than fully enjoying myself.
2 Comments
You summed up my experience with the game perfectly.
NOWITSREYNTIME17
7 months ago