in grade ten we had a PE teacher who would usually just give up and say "fuck it, go do whatever activities you want here with your friends." i didn't have any friends so i just kinda sat there and he was like, "why the fuck are you just sitting there" and i was like, "fuck you man i dunno what to do." this game is very neat but it feels exactly like that to me. it's only fun with friends and even then, never a game i really choose to play. or want to play. you gotta put in so much time to make anything neat and, if you haven't already played this before, playing it with people who have just pisses them off when you don't know how to smelt shit. maybe i could spend fifty hours gathering materials and learning how to use redstone to build a little lever or something or i could just have sex with my wife.

My experience with this game has been weird. I wrote about my 3:00 AM ramblings from a launch party with a couple friends, heard some of the terrible plot points from my sister, and now have skipped past that pesky middle part where the game supposedly lives to beat Ganon for my friend who can’t flurry rush to save his life. Have I earned Completed status for this game? I technically had the controller in my hand both when I earned and completed the quests “Defeat Ganon” and “Save Zelda”, so… good enough for me!

These thoughts were written on that friend’s request and concern the last two hours of the game, so full spoilers and all that. Just like last time, no drafts, I’m only spending one evening thinking about this.

I feel like to give context to my thoughts, and to get this out of my system: I loved Breath of the Wild. I toyed with writing a review of that game before Tears of the Kingdom came out, because cultural osmosis was making me think about it again. My first playthrough, two weeks before the game’s official release, was as easy a 5/5 experience as I’ve ever had. But in trying to articulate what I liked about Breath of the Wild, I realized I didn’t want to talk about it. I had a real, human experience with that game that I don’t want to share with anyone, even if I knew how to describe it.

The problem with having a human experience with a piece of mainstream culture is how rivers erode. I never found the horse god in my 120 hours with Breath of the Wild, I never cooked a recipe more complicated than a hearty skewer, I never broke a horn off the flying dragons. But once the game came out, there were some people whose entire experience with Breath of the Wild was catching horses, cataloging recipes, and hunting everything that moved. Suddenly I had tons of knowledge regarding this world of Hyrule that I’d never gained myself. But because I loved that game and that world so much, I didn’t guard myself, because how often do you get to connect with others over something so personal and joyous? So the act of remembering “what is Breath of the Wild?” conjured a memory that was less pure, less mine.

Fun fact, I have not read a single game review written by a person paid to review new video games since Breath of the Wild! I did not read a single contribution to that near-perfect Meta Critic score that I respected! Even though at the moment, Breath of the Wild was my favorite game of all time!

I promise this is relevant for Tears of the Kingdom. Because for the last few years, I have been content to not think about Breath of the Wild as much as possible. I really wanted to preserve that feeling of mystery, that knowledge that I could still connect with something in an all-encompassing yet largely emotional way. (Tears of the Kingdom’s terrible cryptic marketing helped; I barely believed that game was real up until the year of its release.)

But the thing about Tears of the Kingdom, the bee that will not get out of my bonnet, is how much this game is so bone-headedly opposite in ethos from Breath of the Wild. I don’t think most people will notice because bones of Breath of the Wild are still under there, but all art is elevated by the connective tissue, the engineering that turns ideas from concepts into metaphysically tangible objects. To see Breath of the Wild taken apart and reassembled to be more but significantly lesser… sucks. Not just because I would have loved for another easy 5/5 experience, but because those touches of familiarity, those notes being played again but off-key, tear into my cherished memory of Breath of the Wild and force me to think mechanically about how it worked and how it worked for me. Which I really didn’t want to do!

Like, I know now that the combat’s borked, the weapons degradation system was a novel but ultimately flawed idea, the enemy variety was lame, the side quests were mostly pointless, the world was mostly empty. And the DLC was a complete joke compared to what people thought they would get out of it, (but probably because the meat of it probably went on to become this game instead!).

I know all of those things now, regarding Breath of the Wild as a piece of software, and I do not give a single flying shit. It’s not like those flaws didn’t exist in my playthrough. But during those two weeks of 2017, the fantastically unmatched trailer, the best tutorial level in 3D gaming, the art direction, the music, were all enough to more than make up for its flaws. Because what worked harmonized, and the harmony was fresh. It's exceedingly difficult to talk about one element of Breath of the Wild without talking about everything else, because the game was thought of from the ground up as a series of systems. Everything about the aesthetic, gameplay loop, level geometry, and story were designed to accommodate those systems.

In a way, playing the final gauntlet of Tears of the Kingdom was the perfect microcosm of articulating the vague, off-vibes I got from the beginning of the game, because it showed me how unaware and contemptuous Tears of the Kingdom was of the delicate balance of those systems at Breath of the Wild’s core.

(Setting the scene for game's end: we need to dive down a hole, run through a maze, fight through a few waves of enemies, then fight Ganon and his four phases.)

To begin with, why was there black goo that could permanently seal my hearts? That I couldn’t get back with healing items? For just, walking on the ground? What kind of experience is that trying to make me have? It doesn’t synergize with any other flavor of gameplay loop that Breath of the Wild is built on. At best, I could imagine drinking potions to counteract it like an environmental hazard, but if those existed my friend hadn’t made them. Regardless, it’s emblematic of the most artificial way to “increase difficulty” there is.

But why the need to increase difficulty? To make combat more thrilling or tense? Since when has Zelda been good at that? Since when has the Switch run the Breath of the Wild engine at 60 fps to justify trying to be Elden Ring for a moment?

The answer to those last two questions being “never” meant that getting to the final gauntlet to fight Ganon required just… running past rooms of enemies. It felt so lame, but it also felt like the only way to be playing the game correctly. What possible reward could there be to warrant engaging with combat in this scenario in any way? For new weapons? For new crafting materials? It’s the end of the freakin’ game! I’d only need those if I fought those enemies and broke my weapons and…

Oh. So that Fuse ability was multiple thousands of programmer man-hours spent making a new system that papered over the broken and un-fun weapon durability system, did nothing to stop the resultant hoarding and avoidant behavior of discerning players, but did add more resource juggling conveyed via terrible overworld fiddling in place of what should have been a crafting menu! Got it!

So I run past everyone in the awful maze to get to the awful gauntlet, and why hello, Link has a bunch of friends here to help! Great! Why is the button to use their abilities the same as trying to pick up the weapons and crafting materials? Why does the goat woman have a mech suit that takes one accidental button press to clamber inside, but two button presses to clamber out of? In what world could using her bullshit be better than my own, when being astride her mech suit makes me a target 5x bigger and still susceptible to permanently losing my hearts?

Because in this super fun end game, you can’t use any healing items from the moment you descend through to the first three phases of the Ganon fight! Like, why? Why is the game forcing me to not engage with the cooking system? When that was encouraged as a viable way to solve problems in the tutorial Great Plateau in Breath of the Wild? I never cared about cooking, but I knew it was an option!

So after getting through the gauntlet the first time and facing Ganon with four hearts, I cursed and reloaded and realized the best way through was to… continue running around the arena and wait for my friends to kill all the enemies. Because there was no incentive to engage. The cost was a permanent handicap, the reward was… weapons and crafting materials? When the game was going to force me into using the Master Sword as a default in the next room?

(I just want to take a moment to comment how lame all the Breath of the Wild monsters looked with goo on their face and extra crafting materials glued on their heads. Having all of that nonsense shoved into my face made me feel like I really hadn’t missed anything jumping from the tutorial sky island to down in the depths, and that made me sad.)

Fighting Ganon sucked in a way where I could tell the game really, really wanted me to be flurry rushing and parrying his blows. Bro, if your clones and my friends are dropping the frame rate this bad, in addition to getting in my way of being able to fucking see, you do not get the right to design your combat encounter around precision and timing. Again, I had not played either of these games much since 2017, but I was able to get him within an hour. So he was doable, but his fight so clearly demanded a specific play style, and that rigidity really bothered me. The whole initial appeal of Breath of the Wild was the absurdity of fighting him in your underwear with a stick on fire! Where was the option to be a complete dumbass instead of a self-serious “badass”?

I think that dichotomy and policing of tone is really at the core of my complaints. Because the wild possibility set contained within Breath of the Wild was broad and deep enough to get me invested. Did it warrant the emotional investment I gave it? Fuck, all video games are a waste of time, if you want to be an ass about things. Life’s pointless if you break it down to the time you spend commuting, sleeping, doing dishes and laundry. Humans are a tube, and it’s up to you to find the reason why you keep filling up to empty into the toilet. Art’s purpose is to suggest what that reason might be, to convince you that wasting your time engaging with that art instead of your reality can be the reason to live through that reality. Random chance plays a part - I’ve out of nowhere cried at YouTube comments I read on the wrong day - but I argue the quality of a piece of art is how intentional it is about convincing you of the lie, that you can find something of true value both within and within yourself if you give it your heart and time. Breath of the Wild was a cultural moment because it has proved through its staying power how good it was at drawing people in and getting them to invest.

And you know what? Tears of the Kingdom is straight-up coasting. I feel zero shame talking about Breath of the Wild for so much here instead of reviewing it on its own page, because Tears of the Kingdom absolutely failed to get me to invest.

Part of that is because what was fresh in 2017 is not fresh in 2023. The Breath of the Wild aesthetic has been so badly imitated from so many people that the color scheme alone can make something look cheap. Breath of the Wild was excused for its flaws in the context of its time. It was a Wii U port for christ sake, we had no idea if the Switch was capable of better! But now we have years of seeing the Switch fall behind while freakin’ Genshin Impact HD-ified them graphics for mobile phones. But trapped in its own legacy and forgetting the reason that aesthetic worked so well, Tears of the Kingdom tries to fudge it, to evoke that same spirit with different colors and the same brush. It doesn’t work! Yellow is not freedom! Green is not the sky! The colors you picked for Hyrule don’t work when we’re sky diving and deep cave spelunking, and the fixes you tried just broke the spell the original had on me!

And honestly, Sky Islands are a terrible game play idea! Stop trying to make it happen! Either you have grounded gameplay, where the sky island-ness is lost when you make the planetoid large enough to be a Super Mario Galaxy level, or you can freely fly around in 3D space. But if you can fly in 3D space, the sky island becomes an obstacle as much as a destination. (As someone who played Star Fox 64 as their first video game, flying in 3D space kinda sucks! If a game exists without an incredibly clunky grating transition between flight and ground, let me know!) So of course the sky gets sparsely populated, like it was in Skyward Sword, because humans just do not have enough thumbs for 3D movement and camera control and character action combat. Anything with more versatility than an arcade shooter is unlikely to rise above the status of a very niche gameplay character study.

The great irony of my going on that tangent is me remembering my sister showing me a hover bike, which she summoned out of nothing and seemingly could use anywhere, that let her fly past a giant chasm. My brain could not help calculating how long that would have taken to climb in Breath of the Wild, seeing all the design choices that were made for scaling from one side or the other, and then dying inside seeing how it was all pointless. Because how could I invest in this game world when the major mechanic of justifying the game world’s whole existence could be completely invalidated? I cannot overstate this. Hyrule existed in the way that it did so you could climb it. People idiotically complained about “where are the dungeons” in Breath of the Wild when the whole damn map was a dungeon more dungeon-y than their nostalgia-goggled memories. The gameplay loop of climbing, distraction, climbing, reward was so good at invoking investment because it was all completely divorced from traditional video-game-y systems. You did not get points for climbing walls. You were not timed. The rewards for clearing enemy camps or finding korok puzzles sucked. But they were proof of your own triumphs for your own goals. Does that exist in Tears of the Kingdom? It can’t, not in the same way. I can’t not think about how pointless something is if a game shows me a goblin way of doing things. I have to be really invested and subconsciously role-playing to not optimize the shit out of a good time.

So having not been invested in the world of Tears of the Kingdom, I could plainly see how bad the writing was at soliciting my emotional investment on its own merits. Let me be clear, Zelda games have always had bad writing. They have always been good games in spite of their writing. Breath of the Wild had the illusion of better writing by only having a setting, a pretense, but not a plot. An old man wishes for you to save his daughter, and you piddle around until you do. Since you can do this whenever, everything is optional. Since everything is optional, everything you do contributes to your goal. Since everything is tied to your goal, and accomplishing the actions of the gameplay loop is fun, everything feels like it is endued with meaning. So you can invest, in the game, in the world, in the "story."

Tears of the Kingdom foolishly listened to people who complained there wasn’t more story. Guys, the Zelda team don’t know how to do anything you think they should be capable of writing. Everything happens via magic. There are no rules. Lore, timelines, whatever - words, mist, piss in the wind. But worst of all, in this game’s case, their understanding of how to cater to whims is to somehow get more basic and less creative while trying to expand on what lives in this game’s world. Ganon getting horns and a club to look like a stereotypical oni is like… guys. Demise was a terrible character design! Get as far the fuck away from that as you can! You can go in any direction you want with the epithet The Demon King!

I just can not get over how goofy and stupid those dragon designs are. Also reeling that Zelda’s final contribution to the final fight was to be a glorified elevator to try to make diving combat work. It just kinda confirmed for me how much it sucked! It felt so lame to watch Ganon’s dragon googly eyes not watching me land on his patiently waiting head. If this becomes either of their Final Smashes in the next Smash Bros. I’m gonna scream.

(Is it even worth ripping apart the stupidity of Zelda’s time travel shenanigans in this one? Her dumbass decision to eat a rock to become a dragon to grow a sword over the course of 10,000 years, instead of, I dunno, spending a lifetime trying to find another way of doing things before sacrificing her humanity? Maybe eat the rock as a last resort when she’s about to die of old age as a final hail mary? Maybe ask the Great Deku Tree if he has any ideas, a cousin maybe? Ask for a seed to plant a new one on a remote island somewhere?)

I was so mad (again, commensurate with my investment of 7 hours total of this game) when the ghosts of her great-great-grand furry and some other magic lady were able to change her back? And give Link his arm back?? Implying they could have done that at any time??? Because I think Zelda would have been damn useful fighting Ganon earlier once we found her dragon form to get the sword stuck in her head!

When Purah showed up in the final cutscene to just, hang around while ghost furry goat dragon woman died, (and no one shed a single tear (guess no one cared?)), I saw exactly how much respect and care this game had for getting me to invest in it. Because the hundred year old loli from the first game had been upgraded to legal waifu status, granted main character status, and got to be here, at the end, relevant to nothing that was happening. Hoping to engage me because I thought she was hot or something. All as the soundtrack did the most embarrassing oscillations between Tears of the Kingdom’s nothing-burger of a main theme, Zelda’s lullaby, and the Legend of Zelda Main Theme in a desperate attempt to make me feel something. To claw out some meaning from emotional connections to games and worlds that weren’t this one.

No identity. No meaning. No point. $70, game of the year, in all the contempt that implies.

The game that started it all

I came up with the username BEAUTIFUL BRUTE the day I vowed to main & stan the one, the only Miss Rainbow Mika
The most beautiful, funny, charismatic brute out there

“There’s a passion that burns in my heart
The passion to realize my dream!
It reverberates into my muscle soul!
With my strength, determination, and spirit, I’ll become as bright as the…RAINBOW!”

an absolute delight. i think we’d be best friends <3

I feel like I say this every time but damn if there was a game I was certain I wasn’t gonna like upon revisiting it, Skyrim would’ve been my number one choice. It’s a big budget western game made by the developers of all of my least favorite Fallout games, it simplifies the remaining Elder Scrolls RPG systems even more than Oblivion did, and, I mean, it’s just so lame to be like “I LOVE SKYRIM” in 2023. BUT JUST LOOK AT WHAT HAPPENED!!!

Basically, as much as Skyrim’s design builds heavily off of Oblivion’s, it’s setting and mood are much more reminiscent of Morrowind. Not that it feels the same, Morrowind is all alien and ash-covered, where Skyrim is all vikingy and snow-covered. It’s a more classic setting for sure, but there’s a lot of unique flavor on top that Oblivion simply didn’t have, with its throwback-to-daggerfall tone. There’s a culture to explore, a land to learn, and a complex system of faction relationships to untangle, whether they be classic TES guilds or almost Fallout-ey political factions. What’s really great about these factions is that the division between them, the civil war that sets the scene for the game, is incredibly morally ambiguous, in that classic way that no matter who wins, so, so many people lose. Morrowind had wonderful factions as well, but the factions in Skyrim feel more active, more direct, like you should choose a side even if you don’t really want to. The flora and fauna are less varied and less… strange than Morrowind’s, but put Oblivion’s collection far to shame. All this to say Skyrim feels fleshed out and thick in the places Morrowind did, in all the places Oblivion felt thin and repetitive.

The design systems Skyrim continues from Oblivion aren’t my cup of tea generally, but they’re also not the kinda things you can walk back. In particular, the non-diagetic fast travel cat is out of the bag, and the amount of people who want it removed and/or the game designed to be fully playable without it is.. not that large, and it was certainly tiny back in 2011. However, in the recent versions of the game, there’s a survival mode you can enable. Basically, it makes you need to eat, sleep, and stay warm, and removes your ability to fast travel. Since I wanted a more detail-oriented experience than my fast-travel-laden sprint through Oblivion, I decided to try it out, and honestly I’m glad I did. While it’s suuuuuuuper tacked on and clear the game is not built around it at all, for most of the game it was great to have to plan my routes, stock up on food, and make sure to rent a room every time I went into a city. I used the carriage to travel from city to city all the time, and would hide out in caves along paths if I was getting too cold. I would definitely recommend trying it out, but also being ok with turning it off at certain points of the game (at one point I almost froze to death during a particularly long story-required dialogue on top of a mountain). It’s dumb and tacked on for sure, but putting it on during the early and mid game really accentuates the rpg elements of the game, and makes you treat the world as a place instead of a backdrop.

Really my only large issues with the game are that 1. they really needed to hire more voice actors, so many (sometimes major!) characters have one of two voices and it really hurts the immersion, and 2. for a special edition rerelease of one of the most successful games ever made, wow there’s so many bugs and weird bad-feeling failure modes. Like, and this is carried over from oblivion, if you’re walking up a slope and it becomes too steep to walk up, you just stop. You can’t jump, but you can move laterally?? And if you stop moving you VERY SLOWLY slide down the slope. Feels terrible. Also like, the shouts and the magic are tough to use in a pinch, as their animations have strange timings and the shouts in particular just like, don’t happen sometimes. I’m ok with this kinda stuff in general, and most people know skyrim is buggy as hell, but it’s also wild that it’s so buggy at this budget and level of success.

But yeah, broadly, Skyrim is a return to form while still keeping the grandeur of Oblivion, in a way I’ve never really seen a studio pull off before. It feels bigger and more streamlined, but also well detailed and deep if you look at it, and most importantly it lets you know “HEY, LOOK AT THE DEEP COOL PARTS, DON’T JUST GLOSS OVER THEM”. It’s considered and well made and goddamn I feel so lame for gushing on Skyrim lmao

I used to be a lore guy.
I used to get so caught up in the specifics of details interlocking and having causal relationships to each other. Skyrim has none of that. Instead it has vibes. It's all vibes. When I was younger I tried to dig too deep and was resentful of what wasn't there. I'd kit it out with a billion mods and try to make it something it wasn't. Some games that could loosely be thrown in the same genre - New Vegas, Disco Elysium, Baldur's Gate, are novels with added dimension. Their art is text; the game around them is just their interface. In this realm, Skyrim cannot compare. But why would it? It's not literature, it's a virtual diorama. It's a gorgeous landscape accompanied by the beautiful soundtrack of Soule that, somehow, no matter the angle, is always serene and mystical.
I convinced myself I despised it, yet every few years I boot it up and go for a lovely little stroll around a familiar old countryside. There's a reason this has become such a totemic piece of culture.

mascotizing, de-eroticized, de-humanizing wooby doo-doo that started out as a low key homophobic ~sooo randim~ joke about how funny gay cultural nomenclature is to its straight creators but then got agonizingly retconned into game grumps' (ugh) flailing attempt at a self-serious inclusivity project. Too ignorant and afraid of offending anyone to portray anything resembling adult human intimacy or eroticism, and reeks with the no homo!!!! creator's fears of depicting anything messy, hot, or specific about icky degenerate gay sexuality. Never overtly cruel and clearly interested in playacting safeness and inclusivity, but the placid smoothness of everything feels like its own form of erasure--and it's a smug, self congratulatory one. This is clearly not really trying to provide anything meaningful or substantive for gay audiences: it's for obnoxious straight "allies" to play and have fuzzy wuzzies about how great they are for wubbing the cutesy wootsie daddy poos--they're smol pastel beans just like us!!! Heinous. I dont want to yuck anyones yum too hard or whatever but if you're a queer adult and love this game I kind of think you're a fucking idiot