Sometimes people want to be a part of the thing. Particularly, people want to be a part of the the BIG thing. Even MORE specifically, people want to be part of the CURRENT BIG thing. It is some sort of vital ingrained compulsion that those connected to the internet or larger social circles through whatever vector develop innately. A lot of people call this compulsion FOMO, but I think it's worse than that. I think it's a human colonial impulse to want to stake some kind of ownership on the act of being- to say "this moment in time is mine and I exist. No one can take away this moment that everyone experienced and since this moment is at least partially mine, I am important and relevant and wanted. There's nothing wrong with wanting to be on the same page as your friends or whatever, but I'm talking about something else.

Breath of the Wild felt manufactured with the intent to create vapid marvel movie spectacle and crossbreed it with this "of-the-moment" impermanent obsession; it became a hybridized experiencesociety chimera. You can see this in a lot of the marketing for Tears of the Kingdom: tweets asking "are you ready to join all your friends and play more Tears of the Kingdom after a day away?" posted on a monday morning after the game's weekend release run. They do the thing all too-big-to-fail mega titles do where they put up a screengrab of the world map, the sheer amount of game in the game, and say "here we stand, towering over everything else. Look at all these 10/10s. We are beloved. Come be with us in our belovedness."

Which is all not a criticism of the game as much as it is a consequence of what the market generates. They want you to want them, like Fiona Apple wants you to love her on that one song where she starts making sounds like a gibbon. The difference is that Fiona Apple is a particular human being and BotW is a product and Link doesn't make funny gibbon sounds.

This game does initially feel magical and mystical, widescreen and arresting. It then quickly descends into a directionless IRS collection call job, running the world and ripping up its stones for your precious prizes with no real purpose other than the vague sense of seeing the number go up. Which is my main point of criticism for this game: it is an idle game that requires fantastic amounts of input. The gameplay loop is shallow and one dimensional, recycled challenges ad nauseum with nearly no shift in basic theming or even challenge. Everything is about as hard as everything else, the dungeons are footnotes at best, and the story borders on non-existent. None of these things are damning on their own, but combining them with the now ubiquitous presence of mechanic imitators and the virulent breathless exaltation of the game atop every possible "cool thing" list, and the fact that it seems to have earned this status for simply being unobtrusive, inoffensive and obscenely expansive in its vanilla nothingvoid- it makes me start to wonder if a lot of this weird culture was a deliberately induced by nintendo.

Maybe that's nuts. Maybe it's crazy to assume that Nintendo is happily creating a culture of expensive and time-consuming mediocrity to bring in the largest audience, to create some sort of universal group think that makes the property unassailable and infinitely valuable. Maybe that's nuts.

I think Link should be a girl