typically i am one of those that likes to defend the whole "flawed masterpiece" ideology by saying "no! it deserves its praise!" but this definitely fell a ways in its remaining four or five hours, boiling down to "hey, this thing you need is across the map" and then getting there and being met with "ok, now go back to near the beginning of the game again" repeat x8+ . but no matter, this thing is super ambitious for the system its on and i gotta give it credit for that. just to name a few of the things that surprised me --

- pretty in-depth billiards mini game with three different modes, playable characters, different cue balls that have abilities of their own
- a full fledged stock market that will go up and down in price
- dungeons with unique loot
- semi-open world, large explorable areas
- multiple dialogue options that change how the game progresses with fully voiced dialogue
- a guitar hero-esque rhythm game with multiple instruments that all play differently (and singing!)
- a customizable mech that can change your mobility + special attack and movement animations for different parts
- a sort of bestiary / journal for literally every and any NPC in the whole game with names and descriptions for each (and there are lot, cities full)
- rentable apartments with a bunch of placeable furnishings found from dungeons and shops
- dating sim for three different possible dates
- food recipes?? / cooking
- haircuts
- day / night cycle
- arena fighting with 32 different unique characters / mechs
- loads of side content, including but not limited to finding a whole secret optional town with its own characters and side story, creating an electric guitar for a new playable song (only with fennel though), finding a rideable bicycle throughout the overworld for faster travel, being a food trader throughout the land

and probably other stuff too im forgetting. but you get the picture. i was reminded of so many other gems while playing this, a really good thing i think. the people meandering about the towns make me think of the overworld areas in Sonic Adventure, they sort of walk around aimlessly like mannequins but somehow make the world feel so alive just like in that game. im not sure if its because everyone has names or unique dialogue or what. i was getting inklings of Shenmue as well, with the concept that everything you see is inspectable, and at best able to be interacted with. the dungeons are super Dark Cloud, your trotmobile controls like a Katamari, and the art style is as if Tsugunai: Atonement had cel shading. its really charming.

yes, it would be nice to have this on modern platforms, but there is so much lovely early 00s jank, questionably lewd dialogue and other potential qualms that i imagine just couldn't be supported anymore. i love all of em though, and i think a lot of others do too.

edit -- have also come to the realization after a week or two of finishing this that this game is deeply depressing in its themes throughout and probably one of the sadder games i have played. i would get into all of it but that'd require some spoiling and a lot of text. its definitely worth reading up on, since the main story itself doesn't give away a lot unless you dig for it. anyways though, not to end on an old man rant but i will say it for the thousandth time, they don't make em like they used to!

This is one of the best remakes of all time, without question. Whether we wanted it or not, we’re now firmly in the era where studios WILL put their hands all over our beloved childhood classics, and we’re in good hands if some of those are handled with anywhere near the level of respect that Gemdrops has shown for SO2 here. The Second Story R is a lovingly crafted return to a flawed, yet seminal PS1 classic - it updates in some much needed areas and preserves in others, but never once does it lose the original’s soulful, doujinesque flavor. If you’ve ever wanted to “get” Star Ocean, there’s no better game to play than this one. tri-Ace supremacy.

It’s rare that a video game gets a second shot at life. The three weeks after a title’s release is the critical window where most sales are made and the strongest impressions are left. After the proverbial ink dries on the pages of review sites (if you’re fortunate enough to get any) and the chatter dies down, sales gradually taper off to a slow trickle. Unless you’re Nintendo—whose games buck the trend and continue to sell year over year—your options are limited; you can release an update or tack on some DLC for a modest bump, but it only delays the inevitable. However, there’s one wild card that can occasionally bring a stagnant game back from the brink of death: social media trends.

Among Us is doubtless the most famous example; released in 2018 to little fanfare, the Mafia-style multiplayer game exploded in popularity at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic due to popular live streamers setting up games with friends. It was an organic moment in which the game’s appeal was demonstrated by regular people simply playing it and enjoying themselves, free of marketing campaigns, stilted tech demos, or money exchanging hands under the table. These days, with the increased prevalence of streaming, it’s not uncommon for games to get rolled up into the online ecosystem, extending the tail of their lifespan and keeping them in the public consciousness much longer. (This outcome is so desirable that some developers even try to court influencers with their game design choices.) Suika Game is the latest benefactor of these surprise viral trends.

The physics-based puzzler began life as a Chinese mobile game called Synthetic Watermelon (合成大西瓜), spreading through word of mouth via Weibo (China’s equivalent to Twitter) in early 2021. The premise is extremely simple: fruits fall from the top of the playing field, and combining two matching ones creates a larger fruit. Your goal is to continue combining fruit until you create the largest one (the watermelon, of course) while keeping your stack low enough so that it doesn’t spill over the top. The game became massively popular in China, but avoided crossing over to other countries due to the walled garden of Chinese app stores. (Searching Synthetic Watermelon or Suika Game on Western storefronts turns up a bunch of imitators, but don’t download them; they’re all terrible.) Synthetic Watermelon would eventually leapfrog over the Sea of Japan later in the year through an unlikely avenue: a high quality clone version by the company popInAladdin, developed for their line of home projectors as little more than a demonstration of the technology. The new remix on the Chinese mobile hit was modestly popular—enough that the company thought porting it to the Nintendo Switch as Suika Game (スイカゲーム) was a good business move—but it didn’t make waves right away.

Suika Game really started to blow up in 2023, circulating around the Japanese-speaking internet and eventually catching the attention of influencers. Popular livestreamer Futon-chan (布団ちゃん) played it on September 7th, describing it as “a game I often play in my bedroom.” From there, it shot to the moon; VTubers from Nijisanji and Hololive are streaming it for insane amounts of hours, and it’s currently the top selling game on Nintendo’s online storefront in Japan as of writing.

But what makes it such a good stream game? First of all, it’s easy to comprehend; you don’t have to observe for long before you’ve gotten a grasp on the gameplay loop. The goalposts can shift the moment you accomplish a milestone you’ve set for yourself, which keeps you playing for a long time. First, your goal might simply be to make one watermelon; then, you get fixated on making two; after that, you have to beat your high score. It’s also highly competitive, so people that love to backseat are instantly engaged and eager to prove they can put up better numbers. Most importantly, there’s an element of unpredictability. Suika Game is a matching-style puzzler, sort of like a Puyo Puyo or Drop Mania, but the fact that each piece of fruit has physics that affects every other one can lead to amusing and unfortunate consequences. Often, you’ll accidentally launch a tiny cherry off into space and immediately get owned. More opportunities for the player to suffer means more entertainment for the viewer—the popularity of Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy as a livestream game has proven this.

“Stream game” has become a sort of pejorative in certain circles, carrying with it the implication that it’s a better experience to watch than actually play. (These criticisms often get lobbed at things like the Five Nights at Freddy’s series or Tsugunohi—a game that a disingenuous person might describe as nothing but “walking to the left.”) Depending on your values, it might sometimes be the case that you’d rather be the observer than the person at the controls. There’s nothing wrong with that! What makes Suika Game great, though, is that it’s a good time no matter which side you’re on. I enjoy testing my fruit stacking abilities just as much as I do scrolling the game’s hashtag and observing random Twitter users succeed or fail at it. The game’s taken a hold on some of my friends, and it’s been a blast sharing scores and screenshots of my misery. To put it simply: Suika Game is a good stream game because, more generally, it’s a good social experience. It’s fun to share the moment with someone else.

Tears of the Kingdom is Breath of the Wild's Master Quest. Even when viewed strictly as a sequel to Breath of the Wild rather than a whole new Zelda game, it feels more like an extremely ambitious rom hack. It is Breath of the Wild but bigger and with different tools, and that renders it a decent video game by sheer inheritance. It also frustrates and demoralizes me more than anything I have encountered this year, and this is the same year in which FFXVI set up a fantastic story and then somehow disappointed me with it at almost every turn. TotK retains BotW's beloved looseness in its puzzles, its inspiring allowances for creativity, and to my boundless surprise, almost all of its problems.

Regardless of how bright-eyed and hopeful it made us, BotW was never without some rather noticeable deficiencies. While I have always recognized the necessity and the wisdom of the fools-loathed durability system, it brought with it the pestilence of accounting. Most of the times that I opened a chest in Breath of the Wild, I was told that I didn't have enough space to accept whatever weapon or shield the game had just tried to reward me with. This buzzkill moment would then either require me to pop open a menu and choose something to drop, or to close the chest and walk away. This frequent chicanery was one of BotW's biggest flaws, and it was drastically exacerbated by the decision to repeatedly HIDE the NPC who expands the player's inventory. As much as I liked the Korok puzzles in their position as elegant curiosity reward nuggets for any players who intuitively secret-hunted in the nooks and crannies of the world, Hestu served as a bizarre, unnecessary roadblock to put between the players and their fun.

Imagine my surprise then, when instead of the exact sort of basic quality of life improvement that one might expect from a sequel, Nintendo decided to quintuple down on that inventory nightmare. Hestu thankfully stays put in a predictable location after you initially find him this time, but he and his Koroks (like Great Fairies and a rather depressing number of other things) are back in exactly the same capacity as the first game. In fact, most of the Korok puzzles are in exactly the same style. Follow the little sapling, check the rustling leaves at the top of a building, shoot the balloons, hurry to the ring, match the rock formation, match the block formation... all of these return in equal force. There are new ones too, of course, but many of these new ones are far more tedious than types imported from BotW. I have now run right past roughly 80% of the cork Koroks I've seen because I just do not find them in any way amusing. The first time I saw one of the stranded backpack Koroks, I thought it was absolutely adorable, and frankly I still do. Nonetheless, every time I see one now I have to stifle a sigh. For most of the game I just picked them up with Ultrahand to manually carry them, because the thought of building yet another vehicular contraption just for this was so exhausting that I would rather choose the hike.

When I said that TotK had different tools, I was talking about Ultrahand. Sure, it has other rune replacement powers, but Ultrahand is quite obviously in a totally different class. In BotW, it felt as though a similar number of shrines were devoted to each Sheikah rune. In TotK, unless it's one of the new and improved combat shrines or the handful of Recall shrines, it's an Ultrahand shrine. We'll talk about Fuse in a minute, but Ascend is basically just an important piece of your character's mobility kit with very few puzzle applications, and while Recall wonderfully sports creative puzzle, combat, AND convenience applications, it feels tragically underutilized. Ultrahand is very definitely the limitless multitool that the player is expected to use when resolving almost every non-combat situation.

Ultrahand is Magnesis, but everything is metal and everything can be glued together. This means that you can make whatever stupid bridge you want to get over your obstacles, but more importantly it means you can build cars. Building stuff is not just something you CAN do, it's something that shrines and sidequests constantly require you to do. Part of the controversy that has publicly engulfed these building systems is that interacting with them at all requires you to fiddle with pieces and parts until you have something that might work, then you try it, screw it up, and rebuild the whole-ass thing from scratch. The sky islands (a failure of Skyward Sword that I really did not need to be reminded of) demand a particularly goddamned obnoxious amount of screwing around with stupid flying junkpiles. Now would be the opportune time to point out that saving your game does not preserve anything you have built. If your ramshackle whirligig does not have enough batteries to reach your destination or your fan distribution is off balance or if your glider doesn't fall off the edge of the island just right or if you die before you can deliver the 15 logs you've hot-glued together, it doesn't matter whether you've saved first or not. You're building that whole shit over again, and boy, I hope you don't do a worse job this time because of how bored and pissed off you are about having to do it again! The only Zelda game that has ever frustrated me as much as this particular feature of TotK is the raw difficulty and classic cruelty of Zelda 2... but I can save-state in Zelda 2. Mercifully, there IS an auto-build power buried in the game if you can actually find it. UN-mercifully it's highly particular about exact numbers of parts and demands a somewhat scarce resource to make up the difference if you're short on anything, which drastically limits its usefulness. It's good that it's here but bad that it's buried, and it feels insufficient.

Ultrahand's ability to build blows the game's puzzles wide open, and I have to applaud the team for MOSTLY succeeding at accommodating this outrageous level of player power. Between this and Ascend's utterly wild mobility, an extreme amount of attention had to be paid to every situation in every environment, and they've done a remarkable job with this. And yet... when a player has this much power to solve any problem just by building whatever weird bullshit first enters their mind, so many of those problems no longer feel like puzzles. Take the looseness of BotW any further and rather than puzzles with a few different solutions that click into place in the player's mind, you start getting things that just feel like trivial annoyances because they player doesn't feel like they "solved" something. They just feel like they nonsensed their way through some meaningless chaos that only slowed them down. Even in these shrines where the materials the developers offer you have clearly been carefully considered, things sometimes feel as though they've lost all meaning... as if that puzzle wasn't a PUZZLE, it was just a... pile of things. The player no longer feels smart for solving it. They just did the only thing that made sense to them. Doing what comes naturally until it suddenly works doesn't necessarily feel like a satisfying puzzle. Those "aha" moments usually come from being forced to think outside of your own personal box. Without the friction of having to meet the puzzle on its own terms, it just becomes you going about your basic business. Speaking of piles of things...

I hate Fuse. I'll just go right ahead and say it. The idea is clearly meant to inspire the player toward building creative custom weapons, but this is twice as much trouble as its worth. Firstly, just to get this out of the way, most of the fused weapons and shields look absolutely terrible. There are SOME things the player can make that look like reasonable, believable weapons, but especially in the early game players will be gluing boulders to the ends of sticks over and over again. In the first few hours I thought that maybe I was clever for sticking a bomb flower onto my shield, but it didn't take long for me to realize that having a ridiculous floating cartoon bomb forever hovering unstuck from my back was invasive enough to ruin my first viewing of every new cutscene. Fortunately shields aren't all that important to gameplay in general and I simply stopped fusing things to them, but to play TotK without fusing new weapons would be a task beyond misery. TotK has used its story's inciting incident as an excuse to turn every weapon in all of Hyrule into actual garbage. I consider this to have been a big, stupid mistake.

The durability system in BotW exists because while exploration should be valuable through the thrills of adventure alone, as a general rule it should also lead to treasure. In case you somehow STILL do not get this after having half a decade to think about it, your weapons break in BotW so that thirty-seven hours into the game, you will still care about finding a fiery greatsword. You churn through your rewards in order to make room for new rewards, which will still have utility. Otherwise the whole reward economy falls apart, and players start complaining that they put in a bunch of effort to explore something and didn't find anything worthwhile. These little treats are also essential for offsetting the player's opportunity cost. Exploring frequently eats into a player's resources... such as their weapon durability. In Tears of the Kingdom, almost everything that Link finds is either clothing (which is still upgraded in the same way which encourages commitment to a single set, making the player uninterested in almost all of it) or actual trash. If you want new weapons, you're going to have to cook them. I say "cook them" because the process evokes one of the most boring activities that existed in Breath of the Wild... cooking, which also returns in TotK completely unchanged because according to suit-wearers who do not actually play these games, every AAA video game of this decade must have crafting. Cooking, Fuse, and occasionally Ultrahand building all involve the player standing around and scrolling through huge lists of too many things, dropping them out from menu to game world, and then making them into the thing they need to be. With Ultrahand this can get time consuming because it takes a while to get the hang of rotating objects into their desired positions, and even WITH "the hang" it's a lot of inputs. With cooking this can get time consuming because there are too many animations and you're probably going to be making a million things at once. With Fuse this can get time consuming because you have a limited weapon inventory that you are constantly churning through and everything that you find on the ground is unusable, so you have to take time out of your life every so often to drop what you're doing and fill your inventory with things you can actually use. In the beginning you might actually be inclined to experiment with this, but before long you'll just be sticking Black Bokoblin horns onto everything because you have a ton of them, they're not super valuable, and they have decent attack power. In BotW you were likely to hold onto your fancy weapons as best you could, but as you eventually picked up better stuff, you'd end up using them sooner or later. In TotK the game keeps giving me diamonds and I have only used them to complete quests. I have enough of everything else on hand that I don't need to, and they're too valuable. Thus in the name of cost efficiency I slog through enemy health bars with mediocre weapons far more than I did in BotW. You can call this "a me thing" all you want, but this is the kind of player psychology that game development revolves around. If you don't want to stop and cook yourself some new weapons, your alternative is to waste time (and resources) slapping your enemies with pool noodles, which will then make it harder to get any of the resources you COULD use to cook more weapons, because they're all drops from high level enemies.

By now you've either stopped reading because you disagree with all of this and you hate me now, or you've noticed the pattern. TotK improves almost nothing from BotW and either further aggravates the old problems or invents new ones where none existed. I felt the need to establish all of this before revealing just how hung up I am on the BIGGEST problem that did not previously exist. I have already seen this entire world. Zelda as a franchise is, at its very core, about exploration. The darkest moments in the series are those at which it had forgotten this. Can you tell that I don't like Skyward Sword? TotK feels at first like it may still be full of such new frontiers, what with its glue-guns and rocketships, but once the capabilities of the player's toolset have been laid bare on a worse, more annoying version of the first game's Great Plateau (right down to being chaperoned by a king's ghost), players are dropped into the exact same world that they've already milked dry in the first game, only now there are caves and climate change and some huge, distracting pillars of detritus hanging in the clouds and ruining the view.

I am truly, sincerely stunned by how little TotK does to alter the map or your quest across it, especially after seeing it leave systems like Koroks and great fairies without even so much as a re-flavoring. Yes, there are now entrances leading down into a huge, boring, frustrating, single-biome darkness map and yes, the first game's NPCs have shuffled around a bit, but if I may spoil something that becomes evident only a few hours into the game, there has been no significant timeskip. The Korok forest has not burned down. The desert has not flooded. There are no new mountains and the civilizations of the world have scarcely budged. The biggest singular change on the entire map is the removal of a liquid from one of the previous game's four main quest areas. These four places, by the way, all reprise their exact same roles. Your main, overarching quest in Tears of the Kingdom is to go back to the same four places, and help them with a new problem in the same fashion as you did in Breath of the Wild. In each location you will meet primarily the same characters, since, again, it's been only a year or two since the last time you were there. Faron still has some cool environments and not much else. The Gerudo Highlands is still just a redundant mountain zone with a couple of shrines in it so that there isn't a big empty hole in the map. Rather than granting new and interesting significance to any of these places, perhaps precipitated by the emergence of a dungeon, we go to the same Rito village with the same layout and mostly the same inhabitants, only this time it's snowing really hard. The Gerudo Desert at least has somewhat of an interesting hook, but the only things it feels like I'm discovering in this world outside of new game mechanics and shrines is that everything is exactly where I left it. With the exception of A Link Between Worlds, a much shorter, breezier game which was an intentional return to a long forgotten, much requested form, this has never happened in the history of the franchise, and with very good reason. This is not discovery. This cannot possibly compete with a Hyrule that I have not already seen. Breath of the Wild already suffers rather grievously on repeat playthroughs as its main quest content is weak and actually going through the motions of its side content quickly becomes a slog if the player is not discovering that content afresh. I have done all of the shrines in Breath of the Wild twice. Once on release, and once a few years ago on Master Mode with all of the DLC. Going through those motions in Tears of the Kingdom is far more laborious, and I can tell you right now that I don't ever foresee myself wanting to replay it for any reason other than intellectual retrospective curiosity after a decade or two.

I can and DO obliterate Ocarina of Time over the weekend several times a year. I play it by way of its randomizer, but I'd be having almost as much fun if I were just doing the vanilla game over and over. Going through the motions with OoT is fun all of the way through. Going through these motions even ONCE with TotK has been exhausting. Even the overworld shrine quests have become far less interesting, now revolving almost exclusively around figuring out how you'd like to move a big crystal from point A to point B. In BotW they were the endpoints of more interesting sidequests, or riddles given by the game's best character, Kass, who is now mysteriously and egregiously absent from the entirety of TotK. Scrubbing this same map for a third time became a chore for me almost immediately because my wonder with this world has been long spent and the side content, like that of its predecessor, is so vast and so repetitive that I burn out and glaze over by the time I even hit 30% shrine completion. For the record, no, I have not been going for all of the Koroks or all of the bubbul frogs or even all of the lightroots. I did all of the shrines and basically all of the sidequests. I know that I didn't have to do this. I also know that the most fun I had with the game was definitely from the shrines in Akkala and that the alternatives were to not play it at all or to just play the main quest, and I know that the main quests of BOTH of these games pale in comparison to those which came before them.

When I say that, I'm not talking about story. That's another topic for another paragraph. I'm talking about dungeons and their overworld introductions. For the record, a full suite of excellent dungeons was at the absolute top of my TotK wishlist. The Divine Beasts of Breath of the Wild are its most commonly cited disappointment. There are only four of them, they're quite short, they're all very similar. In aesthetic they were virtually identical, and due to their story context as ancient mecha, they weren't even trying to feel like places. The dungeon spelunker's mystique of delving into places ancient, frightful, and beautiful was pretty much totally absent, and that's roughly half of the Zelda franchise's appeal. Please know then, that when I tell you I genuinely prefer those Divine Beasts to the dungeons in Tears of the Kingdom, and that these dungeons are my least favorite in the entire series to date, I do not say so lightly. Not all of TotK's dungeons are created equal of course... I enjoyed my second dungeon significantly more than the first. My first dungeon was that of the Rito, which is, right down to its aesthetic, almost exactly a BotW Divine Beast. It asks you to activate four terminals hidden in self-contained offshoot puzzle chambers in any order, and then activate a main, overarching device so that you can fight the painfully mediocre boss. Even if the jumping path up to the dungeon is counted as part of it, it left me even less whelmed than its BotW predecessor did because of one crucial, critical difference. You cannot move the dungeon. The only thing that kept the Divine Beasts from feeling like stapled together shrines was the fact that each one had a positional gimmick that varied in function from beast to beast. In each one, you needed to assess every state that the dungeon could be in and what the consequences of that would be when applied to the rest of the space. It may not have done so spectacularly, but it did channel the water levels of OoT's Water Temple or the central pillar of Snowpeak Ruins, or the raising and lowering of the statue in Ancient Cistern, or the multiple entrances of Skull Woods, or the pillars supporting Eagle's Tower, or any of the other twelve or so examples I could give off of the top of my head. The Gerudo dungeon which I sought out second thankfully felt like an actual place of danger that existed in the world... a dungeon, if you will. Unfortunately it finally revealed to me TotK's fatalest flaw... the kiss of death for this entire video game. TotK has systemized its entire experience all the way to hell and back. In "traditional" post-LttP Zelda games, players would find a new item in each new dungeon. This meant that they would find themselves in a new space, often with its own new, bespoke mechanics, and would be given a new tool to experiment with and learn how to use. In Breath of the Wild, the unique element of surprise was at least preserved in the different possible states of each beast. Those movements were unique to the space, and were a new mechanic to be learned, even if each was similar in concept to the last. In Tears of the Kingdom, the Lightning Temple revolves around mirrors which I had already seen and used extensively in several shrines. Every gameplay element of the dungeon was one I was already familiar with, and thus I never had to process or explore new information. Being in that dungeon felt no different from being anywhere else in the game. It was full of enemies that I simply ran past because they posed me no actual threat and killing them would have taken more resources than they were worth, and I had to find the not-so-hidden path forward until I could find the four not-shrines and get to the boss. I used the same Zonai devices I'd been seeing all game long and the same powers that I'd had all game long, in the same exact ways. More than ever before, the formula has won. In case I need to make this clear: In a game about discovery and exploration, a game that lives or dies on surprise, the formula is the enemy.

The main thing that I wanted after Breath of the Wild was a Zelda game with a little less overworld and a lot more underworld. Marvel then at my audacity, as I bitch and whine about the underworld that TotK gave me, because I don't like the dungeons, I don't like the depths and I don't really like the caves all that much either. Both the depths and the caves frequently lead to situations where the answer is not in front of you. You can follow a trail of statues halfway across the depths only to find no reward except a dead end because the actual, meager reward is actually something you access from the surface, could have done all along, and has nothing to do with this goose chase you've been on. Many of the times that your shrine detector goes off (once you finally move the mountains the game asks you to move in order to re-unlock this previously free starting feature of the first game that is now withheld from the player for no sensible reason) the shrine it's leading you toward is actually only accessible through a cave entrance that's hidden a few mountains over. When fast traveling to the shrine nearest to your next destination, it is extremely common to find yourself a mile underground, looking for a decent stalactite to ascend through... a tiny and annoying surprise that adds irksome seconds onto your commute. These frustrations just barely manage to outweigh the things that I actually like about caves. Many of them are fun, shrine-like obstacle course diversions and each contains the equivalent of a Skulltula token, which like in OoT only true freakopaths will collect all of, as the worthwhile rewards cap out at around 50 of them. Of the depths however, I'm more critical.

Because the depths were kept under wraps by The Big N until the game launched, the sheer surprise at learning of another whole Hyrule-sized map in the game I think has caused people to give that map a bit too much credit. The depths are all one biome with two appearances: total darkness, or admittedly cool, spore-filled underground cavern. Total darkness is rarely fun as a game mechanic and isn't fun here either. Even if you get cute about keeping a fire weapon out or trying to fuse brightblooms to things or drinking glow potions, you're probably just going to resort to either constantly tossing brightblooms out manually or walking around in the dark. It's an annoyance that contributes pretty much nothing at all. I would have enjoyed exploring the depths significantly more if I could actually see them, because it would have meant that I wasn't continuously running into giant invisible walls and wondering how far it reaches along any spatial axis. The darkness means that I can't even tell if the reason I can't see the next lightroot is because there isn't one or because something else I can't see is blocking my sightline and I'm actually right next to it. Even when I'm willing to spam the brightblooms, finding the edges of walls and obstacles can often take an eternity and it's better just to stumble in blind frustration. Once the lightroots have made it possible to see, there simply are not that many captivating discoveries awaiting on this map, and it was not long before I started to regard it as nothing more than a whole other full-sized map for me to do my chores on. The fact that it's full of more dangerous enemies means nothing to me. Due to the resource mechanics and the sparse distribution of those enemies, I fought almost none of them. Just like in the rest of the game, there was typically no reason to. I did not enjoy feeling my way around mostly enclosed spaces like the Korok Forest, and only the couple of main dungeons found down there were able to get me anywhere near the Old Zelda tomb raiding for which I hunger.

"Found" is a fun word to use here, because I was having a bad enough time with TotK that even though I'd started my playthrough on launch day, the game had been out for three months before I finally got around to fumbling through the depths for enough hours to find either of them, and the one that surprised me wasn't the one you'd expect. The internet had already told me about the "secret" one, and once I'd heard that you could just do it whenever, I became excited. When Breath of the Wild was first showing us its trailers, I was thrilled to see that they were "doing Zelda 1." My pre-release fantasies for BotW were largely predicated on the experience of that very first game's dungeons. In Zelda 1, the player can just stumble their way into Level 8: The Lion within the first ten minutes of the game, and if they are a bad enough dude to save the president, they can totally just beat it. Having been given no guidance, they can just FIND a giant, ancient tomb swarming with danger and evil, and just DO it. I had hoped that upon finding these dungeons, be they jungle temples or graveyard mausoleums or dilapidated mansions, players would hunt in the surrounding area, do their crafting and cooking in preparation, and then venture inside to clear out that vast and perilous complex. These "hidden" main dungeons did not materialize with BotW, and as each of TotK's trailers increasingly fixated on overworld engineering and assorted sky islanding, I abandoned any hope that TotK would finish fulfilling my vision for Breath of the Wild. I was thus quite surprised to learn that players in TotK can simply FIND one of TotK's later dungeons in an unexpected location long before the game's story directs them to it. I was then quite disappointed to realize that they can't actually DO that dungeon when they find it unless they've either looked up the exact steps they have to perform on two other maps in order to open it, know those steps from a previous playthrough, or got straight up lucky while exploring a seemingly unrelated area under zero visibility. I myself was led by my shrine chasing to only a few steps away from the trigger for this sequence break, and missed what was right in front of me because I was flying blind. Even if one jumps through these hoops just to spite the very concept of linearity, they're not playing havoc with the intended storytelling in any way that's actually interesting.

Breath of the Wild had a very light touch to its storytelling. Link is informed from the start of the game that his goal is to recover his lost strength and defeat Ganon, preferably assisted by the liberated souls of his old friends. Outside of maybe a few cutscenes at the homes of those friends, BotW's storytelling is concerned with character, not plot. This makes these scenes perfect for optional content which can be experienced at any time and in any order. They're scenes in a story that we know has already ended in tragedy. Sure, it can sate our curiosities over WHY that ending came to pass, but the plot details and revelations contained therein are basically irrelevant. None of it is important to understanding anything about Link's mission. Instead BotW's memory scenes exist to invest the player emotionally in what they are avenging, and at the very least it certainly worked on me. BotW's Princess Zelda is my favorite iteration of the character by a country mile, and that prequel story with her as its focus is the emotional core of BotW. It provides Link's entire lonesome quest with a purpose both dire and beautiful, even if the Champions are a rote and hollow parade of paper-thin anime tropes.

If Tears of the Kingdom has such a core, I have not found it. I'll keep my spoilers contained to the next giant paragraph so that you can skip them if you like, but in my honest opinion, you had might as well just spoil it now. It's not worth the effort.

In the opening hour of Tears of the Kingdom, Link and Zelda are separated by a reawakened, once-defeated Ganondorf, here presented as an imposing, incredible lich-samurai who should absolutely not be speaking with Matt Mercer's most generic monster voice. For the record, I LIKE Matt Mercer. He's got talent, he seems like one of the nicest people alive, and he is definitely just giving Nintendo exactly what they asked him for. The problem is that Nintendo does horrible voice direction on anything that isn't Xenoblade. In BotW I was able to look past Princess Zelda's thick slathering of Mystical Briticism and overly breathy delivery on every line as well as the strange, hollow performances from everyone else, but I just cannot abide this English Ganondorf. In Japanese, Italian, Spanish and German in particular, he sounds absolutely divine. I played in Japanese, and the other performances have helped to crystalize my opinion that what Nintendo has is not a localization problem. Most of the Japanese performances don't feel much different from the English ones in terms of quality. While I understand that Nintendo rarely focuses on highly cinematic games, I am exhausted with this. It really, really is not that hard to get good voicework into your ultra-blockbuster AAAA automatic game-of-the-year releases in 2023, and I can no longer watch Nintendo Directs in English because the kindergarten teachers they hire to read the presentations make me want to crush my own eardrums. Thankfully the soundtrack is about as blessed as ever and benefits from a somewhat reduced focus on the previous game's piano. Of course, Kass's Theme doesn't even play ONCE, so the rules say that the OST gets a zero. Sorry, them's just the numbers. Anyway, the decision to immediately remove Zelda herself as a character in a direct sequel after she's already played her traditional damsel role is depressing for a litany of reasons that I don't think we need to work through right now. It's not exactly an uncommon sentiment. We do however acquire some things in this somewhat unfavorable trade. The first of our boons is a POV character with which to explore this game's equivalent of BotW's memory cutscenes, but rather than character-building emotional resonators, these scenes serve as lore dumps and critical plot information. Too critical in fact, because one of them unceremoniously spoils one of the other acquisitions: A situation wherein Ganondorf is "distracting" Link by having him chase phantoms of Zelda all over Hyrule. In a certain way, this is an interesting perversion of Link and Zelda's eternal relationship, with Link's entire purpose in most games being the chasing after of his princess, and that being predictable and exploitable. It's too bad that any player who is thinking about what's happening AT ALL will realize almost immediately that every image of the princess they come across is an imposter, regardless of whether they bumble into the cutscene that just blurts out the fact that Ganondorf has done exactly this in the past. Whether you find this scene or you just get fed up with how overbearingly thick the game lays it on and figure it out dozens of hours too early, it's going to ruin the reveal at Hyrule Castle either way. It's a shame, because both the concept and the scene itself are rather strong, and if they had been used correctly they could have amounted to a captivating twist. Instead it constantly feels like the story is talking down to its audience, expecting them to be enthralled by the grand mystery of the Princess's behavior and to be completely unable to retain information of any kind. Each generically named dungeon follows the same stifling formula wherein one of Link's friends receives a phone call from their nameless, faceless, personality-less ancestor who bequeaths onto them the power of a sage. In the process of this, each ancestor recounts the exact same information about The Imprisoning War, a plot element which we have imported directly from A Link to the Past rather than try anything new. This same flashback information is then relayed AGAIN when all four initial dungeons are complete and the group settles in one place. I felt, quite sincerely, like I was playing Pokemon Sword or Shield. Across dozens of hours I was being presented with the same redundant information about a paper-thin non-mystery while the game expects me to respond with "The Darkest Day??????" in all the eagerness expected of a child watching Dora the Explorer. I was still receiving these cutscenes and playing hide and seek to "fall into" Ganondorf's trap literally (I've checked my play activity, though these are very rough estimates) over 100 hours after I found the spoiler cutscene, at least 140 hours after I had figured out the plot myself, and about 30 hours after I found the real princess. Finding her, by the way, is the best of our trading spoils. It's a nice re-take on an idea from Skyward Sword that provides one of the only moments of the game I found truly touching. It's also probably the only thing I liked about the memory scene replacements. As I said, this time they serve as lore dumps more than anything else. Zelda is used as a window through which the game can introduce the Zonai, our less cool Sheikah replacement race who provide the lore excuses for a whole new suite of shrines and the presence of fans, tires, and flamethrowers now covering every inch of Hyrule. I do not like them. Breath of the Wild introduced a strange and fascinating version of Hyrule that exists so far down whatever permutation of The Zelda Timeline you believe in that it become newly mysterious. Anything could have happened in that time, and the idea of exploring the lore of a far future, borderline science fiction Hyrule was captivating. Rather than a deeper exploration of that world, TotK feels like a retcon to it. The Zonai may have been teased as some vanished, mysterious tribe in BotW, but this reveal of them as techno-magical goat people from the sky were REALLY behind everything all along and who are ALSO the royalty of this Hyrule which is ALSO not any previous Hyrule but has played out almost EXACTLY like previous Hyrule because we're re-using all the same plot points, feels like an arbitrary pivot rather than a pre-planned direction. It feels as though the Zonai and their war against Ganondorf overwrite BotW, not expand upon it. It is a somewhat petty annoyance, but an annoyance all the same. More importantly, these cutscenes detailing where Zelda ended up, Ganondorf's rise and fall, and the McGuffins around which the plot kind of revolves is all sort of really important information that would be much better told in sequence. That spoiler cutscene for example feels like it's supposed to be a big dramatic twist but divorced from all of its context and build-up it doesn't much feel like anything at all. All of these should really have been split into groups and played after dungeons during the main story, while the "memory" scenes should have been character moments taking place during the gap between games. It is a story that doesn't feel optional enough for this, which is why the bare essentials of it are told to the player literally five times along the main questline, just in case that's their first time hearing it. Sure, you could just... have a flag in the code to check or change how information is distributed... or you could have people go make sandwiches through most of the main story's cutscenes. Fortunately, this story does lead up to a lovely final confrontation, and I would not hesitate to say that the final boss gauntlet of TotK is the best in the series. Considering that BotW has the worst, I'd certainly call that a victory. Ganondorf puts up a true, genuine fight, especially to someone who hasn't been upgrading their armor. It's a great finale... but it's not enough to lift my tremendous shroud of negativity.

Beyond my initial session on the sky plateau, almost every sitting that I spent knocking out shrines and sidequests in TotK felt like a wasted day. It's not even that the shrines are bad, they're really, really not, but in completing most of them I felt nothing. It's easy to say that I should have just gotten on with the main quest, but much like in BotW, that "main" content did not thrill me any more than my shrine and sidequest meanderings. If I had stuck only to those main objectives, I would not feel that I'd had an experience worth $70 any more than I currently do. The shrines at least allowed me to revel in new mechanics, even if I ultimately concluded that they were not to my taste and that I preferred BotW's diversity.

Even with all of the obvious labor that must have gone into it, I respect TotK less than any other Zelda game. I wanted BotW to be rounded out and made whole. I wanted its annoyances smoothed out and more importantly I wanted the traditional underworld half of Zelda's design to reveal itself. I wanted big, dark, vast, ominous puzzle box dungeons like in any of the previous 3D Zeldae, maybe even with such a focus that the overworld became an afterthought. BotW could have become the overworld half of the duology while TotK became the underworld half, fully representing the whole spectrum of Zelda's appeal across two enormous, beautiful games. I wanted Zelda herself to be playable, making for a more interesting story and adding a great new twist into the gameplay. I wanted a meaningfully different story structure that put a new spin on the world and kept me guessing. BotW didn't satisfy all of my wildest dreams either, but what it gave me was so fresh and exciting, so geniusly captivating, that thinking about what could have been just feels like splitting hairs. TotK enters into a world that has already played Breath of the Wild, and I never thought that I would be able to make such a direct comparison between the two. I have made it through all of this text without even once mentioning Majora's Mask and I have done so with good reason, but let me say once, here at the end, that I could not possibly make such a comparison with the N64 duology. BotW and TotK feel very much like two games attempting the same thing, and it is entirely my belief that one of them simply does that thing better. Ocarina of Time and Majora's Mask are so spiritually and designomatically different that even when they share an engine, an asset library, and a protagonist, they are apples and oranges. Video gaming's news and marketing culture was vastly different in The Year Two Thousand, and so I had neither the time nor the critical faculties to burden Majora's Mask with the specificity of expectation that I had for TotK, but even if I had, I cannot fathom even my stupid eight-year-old childbrain responding to Majora's Mask in the way that I now respond to TotK. I am more than happy to accept a sequel on its own merits, under the power of its own strengths. I am more than happy to accept a masterful video game like Breath of the Wild, even if it isn't quite everything that I'd hoped it could be. Even when I put aside these desires, these things that I WANTED from TotK, I cannot feel that it is capable of standing on its own. TotK's strengths are simply BotW's strengths, and I'm left with what I can only see as an inferior version of a game I'd rather play for a third time, and given its almost infinite potential, coming from a series that even within the confines Link to the Past's endlessly exploitable formula has radically reinvented itself a dozen times over and produced something preciously unique at every turn...

Look. I said from the start that through BotW's inheritance alone, TotK is a decent video game. I meant that. It would also be extremely disingenuous of me to downplay what a humungous gamecrafting achievement it is to make a game this generously huge and then get it running on the Switch even half as well as this thing does. I had a good deal of fun with the shrines, and there were some cool moments sprinkled throughout the main story. I want to make certain that these things are clear, because I cannot mask the fact that my experience with TotK was drench-saturated with disappointment at every turn. The surprises that it offered me were few and unhappy. The tasks which it offered me did not spark joy, and as art it left me utterly unstirred. The fact that I could build an airplane, within a matter of hours, became no more thrilling to me than rotating a tetromino in Tetris. It's just the mechanic by which the game operates and once abandoned by its novelty it is reduced to tiresome execution. It is a game of endless half-satisfactions. It's a few hours of killer and a few hundred hours of filler, and that fills me with cyberpunk dread.

My backlog gets longer every time Aonuma utters the word "formula," because if I am to survive another winter, my cupboards must be full. Now if you will excuse me, I think maybe it's time to get into Baldur's Gate and Armored Core.

Like with any years' sports game titles, I'm not really "finished" with NFS Unbound and will keep playing it whenever I feel like racing, but I've played enough of it now to throw it in the ol' Backloggd.

I absolutely love it! Like with any yearly iteration of a sports game, I knew I would like this going into it; it's racing, it's got dress-up dolls, I like the general vibe of it.

I don't have incredibly complicated thoughts except for that it's fun to dress up your character and car(s) and drive around and race and just have a blast. What more can someone ask for from a racing game? Any racing game that has a customizable dress-up doll racer is gonna be leagues ahead of the others in my book.

I love this game!

"A young boy had a dream. A young girl has passion. A mysterious stranger had a mission. And the world will forever know their story. As long as there are dreamers who have the courage to pursue their dreams, the world will have heroes. And as long as there is a thirst to discover the unknown, there will be new stories to tell... and new adventures to be had."

Unlike many RPGs, Skies of Arcadia is not about obtaining best-in-slot gear or about doing 9999 damage or about mastering your party composition. In many cases, a player that isn't on the game's wavelength will be tearing their hair out at the game's random encounter rate, especially because combat is frequently unsurprising. Most of the time, you'll find yourself buffing Vyse as much as possible so that he can use Pirates' Wrath or Rain of Swords over and over and over and over. But, again, while serviceable and impressively textured, combat isn't the purpose of Skies of Arcadia. It is always trying to pull something much more childlike and optimistic out of the player—wonderment and anticipation of what strange civilization or discovery lies just beyond those far off clouds. This is one of the only turn-based RPGs I've played that understands the anticipatory pull of what's around the corner in the way that something like Wizardry does. Every discovery gives way to Arcadia's immense scope, with generations of lost history brewing just beneath the fold. The game is riddled with distinct problems that don't weigh against the experience of playing it, of unfurling it, or of finding peace in it. Skies of Arcadia feels like home.