gameplay-wise about as pristine as you can get. same exact gameplay loop and mostly the same map as botw but with all the harsh edges sanded off and somehow this works. played probably between 60 and 70 hours* and was only really just starting to maybe get bored of it. definitely one of the best open world games ive played to date? usually i get bored of these 30 hours in and drop them/rush to the end but i did not do that here, not by a long shot.

[nitpick paragraph feel free to skip]
maybe unsurprisingly, the worst parts here are the bits that deviate from that main gameplay loop. dungeons are better than in botw but are still largely underwhelming. story remains kind of bad/forgettable, with a couple of bits that seem like they might be kind of cool until you remember nintendo has no balls. i remember next to nothing of the story in BOTW, i guarantee i will remember about as much from this in 6 months. voice acting is even more miscast this time on the few occasions you hear it, i will never understand the decisions that led to matt mercer doing matt mercer voice as ganon, and there was not a scene where rauru spoke where i did not imagine some guy in a VA booth reading off his lines.
[nitpick paragraph end]

thankfully all of these are minor nitpicks in a game where 95% of the time is spent fucking off to some unexplored part of the map and exploring it, but they do kind of serve to remind you that this is a toy first and an artistic work second. its weird to see elements as halfassed as the story put next to gameplay as polished and thought-through as this, but this isnt particularly out of the ordinary for what most AAA games want to be anyways. something you see in many AAA games is a drive to be as enjoyable as possible and most games fuck up somewhere but TOTK really never does, not in any major way. if something you value in a game is its ability to kill time, this is very good at that

*idk the exact number because i moved off my switch to an emulator partway through because of joycon drift problems lmao, and that was at around 40 hours. sidenote: if you have a beefy computer (rtx 3000 series or above) yuzu is at the point that with a couple patches its definitely a better experience than playing on hardware on account of the increased framerate and resolution lol

There are a million forgettable YouTube videos out there titled shit like "How [Game] Broke Me" but this one actually did break me and it's probably because I walked in thinking it would be as long as the first game lmao.

The first 30 minutes of my playthrough of this consisted of me and my friends watching me play this over Discord just quoting that "what one is your favorite" tiktok whenever I was reminded of a character existing by all the decals haphazardly placed on all the plain color walls but as the game went on and I realized it would not be over soon all I could do was laugh. Every time I was thrown into yet another room with half a dozen items to find and collect all I could do was laugh. All 3 times you have to sit and trial & error your way through that shitty classroom section all I could do was laugh. It's not even funny-bad like the first game is, I was only laughing at my own hubris for thinking I could knock out the whole series in the span of a night. Zumbo sauce.

Can't wait to play 3 tomorrow!

Not sure that Kodaka's style of stacking twists upon twists really works when compressed down into, like, an hour and a half, but this is still dumb shlocky fun nonetheless. Neat thing to go through if you like his other work on the dangan games, but don't expect to be blown away.

Takada really killed it with the soundtrack here though. Almost worth playing for that alone, tbh. I know we won't but I really do hope we get to hear some more prog electronic and screeching glitch industrial from him on Raincode, lol.

I think over the course of my life I've played this game front to back like 4 times. And it's really unfortunate that, like, the more you replay a game, the more the game's world loses its believability and luster.

This isn't really a review of the game. The game's good, I think. It's hard to know with how many playthroughs I've done so I kind of just have to take my past self's word on this one.

The first time I went through this game I was definitely when I was still early on in elementary school, probably 8 or 9 years old or so, probably relatively close to when the game first released. I remembered a big twist or two but not much else, definitely not the puzzles.

The second time was probably around 5 or 6 years later, in the summer after freshman year of high school. My high school had a P.E. credit requirement, and, like the nerd I am, I took it over the summer so I could cram more honors classes in during the year to boost my class rank. Pretty pathetic in retrospect, but anyways I was probably around 14 or 15 years old at this point. I know for a fact I played through pretty much the entire thing on some volatile phone emulator, but I don't know that I actually finished the last hour or so. Maybe I did, but like, in a crowded gymnasium or something. Or I could have just lost my save right near the end. Again, I didn't really remember every plot beat, but I definitely started to memorize the tricks to some of the more challenging puzzles, which of course takes a bit of the fun out of future playthroughs.

The third time was right at the start of the summer of 2020. We were still only a couple months into quarantine, and I had just graduated my last semester of high school on a YouTube live stream. By this point, I did have an account on this site, and I was already pretty used to viewing stuff from a more critical lens than I had before. Honestly, I came back to play it just to make sure it was still good so I could put it on my top 5, and was it? Hell yeah!! There was an entire plot thread I hadn't really paid attention to on my previous playthroughs, one because I was like, 9 years old and too stupid to understand most of the story at all (lmao), and the other because I probably didn't even get to see the conclusion of said plot thread. And this plot thread is fucking amazing!!! Instantly drafted to my "games that have made me cry" list.

But this came at a cost, of course. When the story is more memorable to you, you're not going to forget it as easy. In addition, a pretty decent amount of the difficult puzzles I knew the gist of what I had to do but maybe not the exact solution, but there were still enough for that playthrough. Not so much for the next one.

The fourth (and probably final? definitely waiting a very long time for the next playthrough if it ever happens) time, just happened! As of writing in February of 2022, a year and a half into University, played in basically one session a couple nights before an exam I've been procrastinating studying for. The main reason I even wanted to play this again, is that between the last playthrough and now, I'd played pretty much every other layton game, and thought that as they went on, they got pretty weak. Anyone who's played Azran Legacy could probably tell you that. And after all of that I was like, "was this series ever even that good in the first place? or was it just nostalgia that made me like it?"

The main downside to playing all the Layton games is that you learn their tricks. You figure out how to, very easily, solve the most common puzzles they throw at you. Oh, here's one where you flip numbers/letters around. Here's one where 4 people all have some stipulation and you have to give them the right hat or put them in the right seat or something. Here's a slide puzzle. Here's one where you rearrange tiles. And so pretty much all of the puzzles I hadn't memorized verbatim by this point (which honestly was a lot) could be solved very, very trivially because I knew all of the game's tricks.

I finished this playthrough in like 6 and 1/2 hours. This is not a game that should be finished that quickly. The pacing is really, really off if you just speed through all of the puzzles like I did, and if you know basically all of the story beats, what reason is there to even play? I mean in the end, it was worth it, but I do kind of ask myself, couldn't I have just watched the last 30 minutes on youtube and gotten the same effect? Possibly even a better effect since I wouldn't have sunk a whole night into playing a game that I've already internalized so thoroughly that nothing about it is novel anymore?

I don't really know. It's like 7am here and I haven't slept yet and I'm really tired so this is probably just incoherent rambling, but honestly this playthrough was just a really sobering reminder that, like, your first experience with some piece of media you love is ephemeral and very much going to elude you as time goes on. And trying to relive that by playing the game again is almost definitely not going to give you the same feeling, a thousandfold for puzzle games with easily memoizable solutions and a thousandfold for story heavy stuff, and this game is definitely both.

Despite all this the I still think the last couple chapters of this game is such a good sequence I kind of have to at least keep it at an 8. For now