Game's good.
But I prefered BotW overall. Apart from the weapon fusion mechanic which actually makes the low weapon durability make sense, I don't think any of the new additions improve the formula of the previous game whatsoever.
Combat is still extremely boring, the focus on skydiving makes the exploration way less interesting as you can just go to the nearest tower or sky island from your destination and fortnite jump to it, all sky islands look the same and most of them even offer the same "challenge", caves are extremely generic and uninteresting for the most part, there's more enemies sure but because they're all evenly distributed throughout the map it still feels extremely repetitive (I have no idea why they don't just make some monsters unique to their regions like they did for the desert), the new nuts and bolt mechanic is of course a miraculous technical achievement but I never felt like using it except when the game forced me to do so, shrines are still way to short and uninteresting (my god why was there so many "fight the robots naked" ones I hated those) and I thought the temples were way less challenging than the beasts in BotW (they all had sick designs though).
It's also extremely strange how they seemingly scrapped any mention of the previous game's plotpoint, like the ancient sheikah technology, the champions and the defeat of 100 years ago, and replaced it with more or less the same thing but different, now the ancient zonai technology, the sages and the defeat of 10,000 years ago. It's like they rebooted BotW even though it's a direct sequel, how bizarre.
I still had a lot of fun with it and I was even extremely surprised how "new" the map felt. It's like they made the perfect amount of change to it without straight up remaking a new map... though they kind of did with the depth which I thought was extremely cool to explore, as it also actually offers interesting reward for exploration in the form of nostalgic armor sets and weapons from the previous games in the series.
Overall, I think TotK is a good sequel to BotW but doesn't actually bring any meaningful change to it. Despite how much critically acclaimed BotW was, it still had flaws and I wish they focused on fixing those and polishing what they had instead of bringing new content to the table for the sake of having more content.
But I prefered BotW overall. Apart from the weapon fusion mechanic which actually makes the low weapon durability make sense, I don't think any of the new additions improve the formula of the previous game whatsoever.
Combat is still extremely boring, the focus on skydiving makes the exploration way less interesting as you can just go to the nearest tower or sky island from your destination and fortnite jump to it, all sky islands look the same and most of them even offer the same "challenge", caves are extremely generic and uninteresting for the most part, there's more enemies sure but because they're all evenly distributed throughout the map it still feels extremely repetitive (I have no idea why they don't just make some monsters unique to their regions like they did for the desert), the new nuts and bolt mechanic is of course a miraculous technical achievement but I never felt like using it except when the game forced me to do so, shrines are still way to short and uninteresting (my god why was there so many "fight the robots naked" ones I hated those) and I thought the temples were way less challenging than the beasts in BotW (they all had sick designs though).
It's also extremely strange how they seemingly scrapped any mention of the previous game's plotpoint, like the ancient sheikah technology, the champions and the defeat of 100 years ago, and replaced it with more or less the same thing but different, now the ancient zonai technology, the sages and the defeat of 10,000 years ago. It's like they rebooted BotW even though it's a direct sequel, how bizarre.
I still had a lot of fun with it and I was even extremely surprised how "new" the map felt. It's like they made the perfect amount of change to it without straight up remaking a new map... though they kind of did with the depth which I thought was extremely cool to explore, as it also actually offers interesting reward for exploration in the form of nostalgic armor sets and weapons from the previous games in the series.
Overall, I think TotK is a good sequel to BotW but doesn't actually bring any meaningful change to it. Despite how much critically acclaimed BotW was, it still had flaws and I wish they focused on fixing those and polishing what they had instead of bringing new content to the table for the sake of having more content.
2 Comments
@SunlitSonata
I feel like even BotW offered alternative approaches to combat and TotK definitely went deeper in that direction. But for someone like me who do not really care about intrinsic reward or who's maybe just not that creative, I just wasn't compelled enough to create zonai warcrime contraption in order to circumvent the boring combat system. The Eventide Isle-esque shrines were never that challenging to me and dragged out for too long. At least the combat rooms from BotW could be dealt more quickly and had a cool unique enemy with cool unique moves (which isn't that great either when it's repeated so much but still).
There's plenty of continuity nods of course, it's still a direct sequel after all (that Kohga questline was amazing). But I noticed how the parts they're "wishy-washy about it" were the ones which, coincidentally enough, were tied to BotW's main questline and are here more or less reproduced as I wrote in my review. Now that I think about it, I could also add the divine beasts which are completely gone (???) (there's not even a single mention of them anymore except in one very specific dialogue about BotW's events???) as well as the sheikah shrines, now replaced with the temples and the zonai shrines respectably. It just felt really lazy imo, why did they threw all of that out if they're just gonna do the same thing all over again?
If we applied this logic to the location, it's like if they erased Hateno village, put another generic village instead and still had you do the blue torch quest from the first game. What they actually did with Hateno village for example but also all other locations for that matter should have been applied to what they had erased, by making the divine beasts take you to the temple for example or something like that idk, instead of just replacing them with near-exact replicas.
I feel like even BotW offered alternative approaches to combat and TotK definitely went deeper in that direction. But for someone like me who do not really care about intrinsic reward or who's maybe just not that creative, I just wasn't compelled enough to create zonai warcrime contraption in order to circumvent the boring combat system. The Eventide Isle-esque shrines were never that challenging to me and dragged out for too long. At least the combat rooms from BotW could be dealt more quickly and had a cool unique enemy with cool unique moves (which isn't that great either when it's repeated so much but still).
There's plenty of continuity nods of course, it's still a direct sequel after all (that Kohga questline was amazing). But I noticed how the parts they're "wishy-washy about it" were the ones which, coincidentally enough, were tied to BotW's main questline and are here more or less reproduced as I wrote in my review. Now that I think about it, I could also add the divine beasts which are completely gone (???) (there's not even a single mention of them anymore except in one very specific dialogue about BotW's events???) as well as the sheikah shrines, now replaced with the temples and the zonai shrines respectably. It just felt really lazy imo, why did they threw all of that out if they're just gonna do the same thing all over again?
If we applied this logic to the location, it's like if they erased Hateno village, put another generic village instead and still had you do the blue torch quest from the first game. What they actually did with Hateno village for example but also all other locations for that matter should have been applied to what they had erased, by making the divine beasts take you to the temple for example or something like that idk, instead of just replacing them with near-exact replicas.
SunlitSonata
10 months ago
There are some continuity nods I like a lot, like with Tarey Town, Kohga’s unknown rivalry with you and one-sided adoration for Ganondorf, the Sidon statue in Zora’s Domain and building further on Zelda’s arc from the last game, but it is odd how other parts are more wishy-washy about it.
But regardless of such, Nintendo succeeded in making something that mostly still felt fresh in spite of the reused setting and the Switch’s aging hardware so I hope the next game benefits hard from the more powerful platform enhancing the style in a new way.