The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom

[Julius]

As announced in today's Direct, Zelda and Ganondorf are getting TOTK amiibo:

Welp, guess I'm getting those too. They look fantastic, especially Ganondorf! 

[Dcubed]

New DLC? No! New Amiibo!

[Ike]

The Zelda Amiibo is great. I'll get Ganny to complete the set.

I think if they were planning DLC they would have announced it by now. I hope they don't, the game has enough content

Or they might be cheeky and hold it off for a possible Switch 2 port?

[BowserBasher]

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So I finally went to the castle tonight, I was holding off as i assumed that would be the final boss fight, but I was looking at how to get into and do the storm cloud area in the sky and found out that I had to do that first, so without reading on further I went back to Purah and onto the castle. Nice little chase and battling of enemies until the encounter with the big evil guy himself. I almost didn’t make it but finished the fight with only three quarters of a single heart left. Another great story cutscene in there, they’ve all be so good. Anyway with that done we all went back to let Purah know and now I’m setting off for the next part. This game just keeps on giving.

Late game spoilers above
 

Definitely getting the Amiibo. On DLC. I would have no issue either way if they added or didn’t. But I think it would really need to be an extension of the story and not just some tacked on side quests. I really think this has been one of the better stories a Zelda game has had for some time and don’t feel it needs any additional stuff. 
 

 

[EEVILMURRAY]

If I was going to get any Amiibo it would be Ganondorf because he's a badass, but the pose doesn't seem to have translated well into a model (with some more paint it could look better), but I hate that clear stuff they use to make them stand up. The dude is quick stocky, the base is wide, I don't see how he needs any support

[Cube]

Got this for father's Day, started playing last night, just reached the surface. I like the new powers and navigating the sky map takes a lot more thought.

 

The building is a bit fiddly but I'm sure I'll get used to it. I keep wanting to use the ABXY buttons to rotate whole holding R, it just feels more natural, and I keep throwing weapons instead of rotating. That said, I haven't properly used the Switch in over a year, so hopefully I'll get more used (I just find they due to different control methods, the switch buttons aren't memorable).

 

The ascened is an interesting power, one I'm going to forget about a lot before realising I can use it for puzzles (I've even already done it), but again, it's getting used to it more. 

 

Really enjoying it so far despite the fiddlyness.

[Cube]

I'm still messing up the controls a bit, but not as much. I've done two temples (Rito, Zora) and a bunch of side quests, enjoying it a lot. I like how they've managed to make the world feel new. 

 

It's nice to see themed temples, but they're unfortunately a bit short and easy - the path to them is a much bigger challenge.

 

I've bought a house and the building does some nice things, but it's also short in a lot of ways. There's no windows and walls you don't complete just leave a massive wall (I was expecting it to fill in). A few layout options for each section would also be nice, as well as changing the colour of the outside (like every other Hudson house in the game). 

 

That said said, I'm pleased at what I've been able to do with the limited options.

 

 

I do have one question

 

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What happened to all the Sheikah stuff? The devine beasts have been mentioned, but are nowhere to be seen and nobody has talked about what happened to them. Even the starting area from BotW has had everything removed.

 

My guess is that they didn't trust the technology to not be corrupted and took it all apart, but that's such a big think that they should have mentioned it by now.

 

[EEVILMURRAY]

  On 6/30/2023 at 10:33 PM, Cube said:

 

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What happened to all the Sheikah stuff? The devine beasts have been mentioned, but are nowhere to be seen and nobody has talked about what happened to them. Even the starting area from BotW has had everything removed.

 

My guess is that they didn't trust the technology to not be corrupted and took it all apart, but that's such a big think that they should have mentioned it by now.

 

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It was aaalll a dreeeaaammm

 

That's one nice house, mine is a bedroom, kitchen, and mainly weapons rooms to stock the nice looking items. It's all out in the open and you have to climb to get to one of the higher floors.

[drahkon]

Oh yeah. I finished this weeks ago.

Not the worst game I've played this year so far.

I'm gonna leave it at that

Edited July 3, 2023 by drahkon

[lostmario]

Finished it last night, 120 hours well spent. Final boss fight was pretty epic.

Really enjoyed it but I definitely need to have a break from open world games as I got the platinum on Forbidden West just before playing this but then I picked up GTA 5 on the PS4 for 10p last month and I can't just let it sit on the shelf.

The shrines became an obsession with me ending up finding them all and not once using the item *no spoilers* I got for finding them all.

First Zelda game I think where I maxed out my health. Pretty proud of that accomplishment.

 

 

[Julius]

He did one on Breath of the Wild, and now Beyond Ghibli is covering the Ghibli inspirations found in Tears of the Kingdom:

Love to see it. I've yet to watch it, but yeah, I imagine there's even more Mononoke and Laputa to go around this time. 

Anyways, I still need to get back to this at some point. Got over 60 hours in, and then just prioritised Final Fantasy XVI (because it's linear and could drag me along to the ending) when it released, which I'm still in the process of going through my second playthrough for.

By the time I put it down, though, I did find myself in roughly the same situation I found myself in with Breath of the Wild, some four years ago now, feeling a little fizzled out on the game (probably 50% - 60% of the total map uncovered, a load of things unlocked, etc.). It's funny, because I swear the reason I lasted 20 hours longer with TOTK before getting to this point is purely down to having some more direct main quests to follow along the way, yet while the exploration and adventure aspect of TOTK is what I love most, it also just takes a lot of energy to want to explore - it's definitely something that I find I need to be in the mood for, rather than chip away at casually. 

It's a shame though, because in pretty much every way (other than reusing the same base world map, but they've added so much it's hard to complain!), I think it's a step up from BOTW, so I do need to get back to it and complete it.

Hopefully before the end of the year. 

Maybe. 

No promises. 

[MindFreak]

I'm at about 65 hours on this game and just completed my fourth temple, the Spirit Temple - I enjoyed the first part of that temple, it was a good puzzle, but the warrior you got access to was way to weak for me. I need to go to Gerudo now for the final Regional Disturbance-quest.

I'm also chipping away at the underground, though I don't particularly enjoy that place. It's a bit too empty and dark for me, and there's so much more to do on the surface and skies.

I feel that I need to up my pace for completing story-stuff now, as I also have other games I want to play. However, I simply don't feel I have the time to play much these days, so it's not that I can just sit down a complete the game. 

[Julius]

According to Aonuma, in an interview with Famitsu (the below is translated via DeepL), there are no plans for additional content: 

  Quote

Interviewer: Now I would like to ask you about the next production, which I am anxious to hear about....... Is it a sequel, a new setting, or something else?

Fujibayashi: I don't know if it will be the next production or not, but I am thinking about what the "next fun experience" will be. What form that will take, I can only say that at this point we don't know.

Aonuma: There are no plans to release additional content this time, but that's because I feel like I've done everything I can to create games in that world. In the first place, the reason why we chose this time as a sequel to the previous game is because we thought there would be value in experiencing a new kind of play in that place in Hyrule. Then, if such a reason is newly born, it may return to the same world again. Whether it's a sequel or a new work, I think it will be a completely new way to play, so I'd be happy if you could look forward to it.

Interviewer: I think that the hurdle that was raised with "Breath of the Wild" has now been surpassed again with "Tears of the Kingdom," and players' expectations have been raised even higher that the company will make something even more amazing, but……

Aonuma: Fujibayashi and the rest of the development team do not consider this a hurdle, so please keep your expectations high!

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I can buy it. TotK is one of the most content dense open worlds I've ever experienced, and honestly - maybe this is coming from a place of needing to return to it but feeling like I could more than double my current 65 hours of playtime so far fairly easily before seeing credits roll - I'm not sure I'd need, or want, more. It's a whole lot of video game. 

...though, I could also see it being the case that there are no plans for standalone additional content, but please be excited for the 4K ultimate edition on Switch 2, with an additional dungeon and Kass. Would I buy the game again to experience that? No. I really hope we don't get DX² versions of Switch games and we can just bump them to 4K/whatever, even if for first party games it's at a flat fixed price of, say, £10. But please: no additional or exclusive content! 

Edited September 6, 2023 by Julius

[nekunando]

Starting to question if I even wanna see this one through at this point 😕

 

[dwarf]

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Completed it.

Like BotW it pulls off some incredible game design surprises. Amazing emergent moments. Hilarious construction/flight fuck ups. At times you enter a flow state and all the different aspects of the game just click. 

At the same time, as the game wore on, the re-used map meant I lost interest in exploring, and obviously the base physics engine is slightly less novel the second time round. The combat is still fairly weak and requires too much menu sorting. Each time I entered combat, I started by attaching a powerful (but not overly precious) item to my arrow, and I self-consciously worried if there was something fundamentally flawed and unoriginal in me for picking out the easy option, or whether the combat itself was simply lacking. Leaning towards the latter. I think for reasons of difficulty, and having to tailor the whole experience to a wide-spectrum of players (different gaming abilities, differently levelled characters) Nintendo broadly had to make every enemy encounter beatable through conventional means. That meant there wasn't enough reason to get creative with vehicles and contraptions, unless you fancied just fucking around for the fun of it. I imagine if you made a point of exploring the depths in its entirety, with all the battle arenas littered about, you'd want to get creative and efficient with the building aspect of the game. The fact I wasn't forced to do so in the normal course of the playthrough meant I generally didn't bother - and simply fell back on easy but tired strategies. 

There's a sweet spot for 20 hours or so in which the game is goated. It's once you've got a handle on the controls, and where improvising vehicles and traversal strategies is incredibly satisfying. You're trying out new tools, figuring stuff out, making mistakes, changing how you approach tasks, etc. Perhaps you persist with a dubious, high risk strategy and you narrowly make it work on the fifth attempt. Brilliant. But when you get powered up (glider, batteries, stamina, etc) and learn how to make the hover bike, much of it becomes redundant. How to put it? The force/desire propelling you to seek upgrades is present and addictive, but as you acquire those upgrades, the playful, self-authored moments diminish. And for me it's those kinds of intrinsic rewards - collisions between your creativity and happenchance physics - that separate BotW and TotK from pretty much all other big games out there, which seem so formulaic by comparison. So TotK kind of shoots itself in the foot, in a way, by letting you circumvent its more interesting mechanics as you progress. Don't get me wrong - there were enjoyable moments throughout the game, but they definitely thin out.

I liked the sky aspect, the sense of scale. Equally the scale did mean that many areas felt surplus to requirements, in a way that they didn't in BotW. Again, this is partially due to the re-used map. It would've been nice to have an excuse to explore more of the world, but when you have ground, sky and depths, and the ability to fly, it'd be insane to do all of it. Especially once you get to the point where you're stacked with items and are ready to beat the game; there's no real gameplay incentive to do more quests beyond that point since the only reward is extra unnecessary firepower. If the story and characters were more compelling I might've stuck around for longer. As it was, there were vast sweeps of the map I didn't visit. Aside from a few cute lines of dialogue, the writing was pretty boring and there was a lot of narrative repetition - a negative side effect of the 'go anywhere, in any order' design philosophy. Let's face it: Zelda, being a game with a broad audience, doesn't have the same latitude as Elden Ring to be cryptic and esoteric with its story - probably rightfully so. But it nevertheless causes some problems in the way it handholds you through its story. Maybe a ten year old child with ADHD forgets about the imprisoning war because they take 60 hours to navigate through distractions on their way to find the next sage. Whereas me – an ELITE PLAYER AND THINKER (lest we forget) – found the repeated story elements all very tedious. Like tune-out levels of dull.

Some of the shrine puzzles were brilliant, though they were few and far between. Definitely untapped potential. Perhaps the only thing that could entice me back would be hunting down the more remote shrines, as they tend to have the more challenging and interesting puzzles. Alas, cba.

I've still got a lot of love for TotK. Despite clear QoL improvements and sequel-worthy additions in terms of mechanics, I think BotW still pips it. A lot of that is down to BotW laying the groundwork for open world sims, and thus being so fresh - the second time round is never quite as impactful. For the same reason I also felt like I wanted to explore all of Hyrule in BotW. Plus, in TotK all the main quests wrapped up quite suddenly for me, and I realised I could bin half the content off. It was like, 'oh, what was all that world-building for?'

Main takeaway is that even though there are a lot of flaws in the new Zeldas, I can partially overlook them because they're such wonderful and ambitious games. I'd rather play a flawed game that takes risks, and reaches high highs, than a perfectly polished version of a game I've played before. Not that Zelda isn't 'polished', per se. It very much is.

Where does Nintendo go from here, then? In a way, TotK seems like a natural conclusion to the open-world sim philosophy they cooked up. Do they continue to iterate on it so that all the different pieces of the puzzle integrate with each other better - minimising the more obvious design flaws in the process? I'd like to see them build on the physics stuff, personally, but package it in a slightly smaller world with more finely crafted dungeons and regions. Change up the field of view slightly. Pour more resources into making the story genuinely interesting - pinch some Ghibli writing talent! I'm not convinced that would represent a seismic enough shift. All I know is that it would almost feel like a backward step to deviate too far from the general approach they've taken, in terms of the freedom they grant you as a player.

D'ya know what, I kind of feel a bit melancholic? Like it took Nintendo so long to reach this level again. It's not that I expect them to get rid of their risk-takers any time soon, given the recent success they've had with them. I just can't imagine being surprised by them to quite the same extent as I have been by their recent Zeldas. It's like Messi winning the world cup, or something. I followed Messi closely over the course of his career and after great hardship, highs and lows, he finally achieved his ultimate goal. But it was a bittersweet moment because, for me, nothing in the sport could possibly live up to that moment again. The combination of having watched him as I grew up, the fact of his historic, unrepeatable rivalry with Ronaldo, etc, etc, meant that nothing could eclipse it in meaning. Messi completed football; with the recent Zeldas, Nintendo completed games. I know the analogy is derivative and strained, but that's the feeling I have. I hope they prove me wrong.

Also, genuine, non-trolling question - I don't play much of anything these days: how should I sell on my Switch? I've got the console, Zelda, joy cons and a pro controller. Would I get more money by selling Zelda and the pro controller as two separate items on eBay? Thanks for any tips.

Edited September 13, 2023 by dwarf

[S.C.G]

  On 9/13/2023 at 9:30 PM, dwarf said:

Also, genuine, non-trolling question - I don't play much of anything these days: how should I sell on my Switch? I've got the console, Zelda, joy cons and a pro controller. Would I get more money by selling Zelda and the pro controller as two separate items on eBay? Thanks for any tips.

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I'd sell Zelda and the Pro Controller separately, you'd almost certainly get the best price that way.

Check the average selling price of Zelda, if it's £50 with lots of other copies for sale, try £48 plus postage, it'll likely sell quickly, especially if you take a good photo of the actual game, as opposed to many other listings which tend to have placeholder listings, which often means you don't really know what you're getting with those.

If you are considering selling the Switch console, just sell it with the Joy Cons and any original packaging you might have.

As for my copy of Zelda... it's still sealed, and if the rumours are true about the game running behind closed doors on a Switch 2 with higher framerate etc, I might just wait a bit longer, so I can play it on a newer console... it's almost tradition at this point to start/end a console life-cycle with a Zelda game.

[nekunando]

I thought I was entering the final battle only to find out there's more.

I haven't felt this upset for a while

I was certain this was ending tonight. Just please let it end!

I'm too far now to walk away.. but I do quite want to..

[nekunando]

 

The map of the depths tells its own story..

[dwarf]

@Sheikah – interested to hear your thoughts on the game

[Julius]

  On 9/6/2023 at 8:16 AM, Julius said:

According to Aonuma, in an interview with Famitsu (the below is translated via DeepL), there are no plans for additional content

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We now have explicit confirmation of this from Aonuma's full interview with The Telegraph. Here's the excerpt: 

  Quote

The developer's ultimate hope is that the world they've created for Tears of the Kingdom will continue to astound and delight players into the future, though they're adamant that it's on to a new version of Hyrule from this point. "When making Tears of the Kingdom, we were able to implement all of the ideas we had on the development side" says Aonuma. think lots of players will have already completed the main game, but we aren't creating any DLC this time. We as the development team are hoping you will continue to enjoy this huge land of Hyrule."

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Good stuff. DLC shouldn't be made just for the sake of it, and as I said before, the game is absolutely jam-packed with content as is, so it's really just not needed. I mean, so was BOTW, but TOTK feels like way, way more game in a weird way, and, for me, fully justifies the price hike seen in some territories. 

Still need to return to the game myself, but very curious to see where it lands in the GOTY conversation at the end of the year. While I think BOTW was pretty comfortably considered GOTY back in 2017, the promise of more DLC certainly kept it on people's radars, whereas 2023 has somehow turned out to be a more competitive year than 2017 in a lot of ways, and games like Baldur's Gate III have become surprise critical and commercial successes releasing much closer to the end of year gaming awards season. 

Not that I think too much stock should be put into GOTY awards (other than your own personal ones), but I'm just really curious to see how it lands. May feels like it was a year ago with how many [high quality] releases we've had since! 

[darksnowman]

  On 10/10/2023 at 3:26 PM, Julius said:

We now have explicit confirmation of this from Aonuma's full interview with The Telegraph. 

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Music to my ears. 

No really. I'm hoping (me! not sales numbers and reviews!) they find a good solid middle ground between openworld and "the formula" because I thought Skyward Sword went too far in the old direction the same way, imo, BotW/TotK goes too far in the "new direction". Strike the balance!

[nekunando]

  On 10/10/2023 at 7:55 PM, darksnowman said:

Music to my ears. 

No really. I'm hoping (me! not sales numbers and reviews!) they find a good solid middle ground between openworld and "the formula" because I thought Skyward Sword went too far in the old direction the same way, imo, BotW/TotK goes too far in the "new direction". Strike the balance!

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I spent the last few years expecting Tears of the Kingdom to strike it.. but the only thing it struck consistently was a nerve!

[Happenstance]

Started playing TOTK today. Not got off to the best of starts. I'm sure most people loved creating loads of stuff but I'm finding it more of a hassle than anything and all this Zonai stuff that's being thrown at me so early on is really overwhelming.

[Dcubed]

I know that this interview was posted a few days ago, but man... what a gut punch...

https://www.ign.com/articles/zelda-tears-of-the-kingdom-interview-nintendo-eiji-aonuma-hidemaro-fujibayashi

  Quote

Aonuma: So I am in complete agreement with what Mr. Fujibayashi said in that games where you need to follow a specific set of steps or complete tasks in a very set order are kind of the games of the past. Whereas currently the games of today are ones in which that can accept a player's own decisions and give them the freedom to flexibly proceed through the game, and the game will allow for that. So I'm in complete agreement with that as our design philosophy, but as the producer, I do have to admit making games that way always carries with it additional development costs. And that is something I have to think about.

It's interesting to hear you say that because one of the discussions that I've seen among Zelda fans is, "Gosh, I miss the more traditional linear Zelda of the past." And I'm wondering, how do you feel about that given the direction of the series toward a very free-form, open-ended kind of design?

Aonuma: Well, I do think we as people have a tendency to want the thing that we don't currently have, and there's a bit of a grass is greener mentality. But I also think that with the freedom players have in the more recent games in the series...there still is a set path, it just happens to be the path that they chose. So I think that that is one thing I kind of like to remind myself about the current games that we're making.

But also, it's interesting when I hear people say those things because I am wondering, "Why do you want to go back to a type of game where you're more limited or more restricted in the types of things or ways you can play?" But I do understand that desire that we have for nostalgia, and so I can also understand it from that aspect.

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Aonuma has no understanding of why people might not like the open world direction the series has taken and no understanding of what made traditional Zelda games so enjoyable.

Zelda is truly dead

Edited December 16, 2023 by Dcubed

[EEVILMURRAY]

Saves them having to put effort into making a difficulty curve.