One week later: Have you been enjoying Tears of the Kingdom?

[dhaabi]

For as much hype as The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom received overall, it's a little surprising that no one here has really talked about it. For those who are playing or have played it, what are your thoughts on it? Does it do a good job at being a sequel entry to Breath of the Wild?

I'm personally not playing it and don't have any immediate intention on doing so. I've yet to even finish Breath of the Wild. With that said, I am very casually watching someone else play from time to time. As a spectator, it doesn't seem that fun, but perhaps that's the issue—I'm not the one playing it.

[redblaze57]

Well... been too busy playing it to write anything about it.

I've just been having a blast playing it. The Hyrule's bigger, and it's neat seeing what similar and all the changes that have happened during the time gap between BotW and TotK

I love finding amusement in the little thing new features bring. Like how you can Fuse a Mine Cart to a shield and shield Surfing makes you Hyrule's Pro Skater and actually grind Rails.

Only complaint is I don’t like X being Jump. I just wish Run(B) and Jump(X) were reversed. Yeah I can swap them in system settings, but it doesn't change the button prompts on screen  so there were quite a few times I went to open the glider, hit the button shown on the screen and fell to my death.

[Cartagia]

All those reviews that said that BotW feels like atrial run compared to this game are right.  It's bigger, more in depth, has more enemy variety, interesting new mechanics while still keeping the great open world exploration,  art design, and combat that made the first game great.  They addressed the sparseness, weapon durabilty issues, and traversal problems (climbing in the rain) with design and feature changes, but they didn't gut any of them.

My biggest complaint is the constant menu-ing that is needed to manage all of the inventory and abilities.

I was actually attempting a no fast travel challenge run, but the game is so massive and my playtime is so limited I had to abandon it.  If I were a streamer, playing 8 hours a day I could do it, but at 1-2 hours a day I'd never finish.

[kamikazekeeg]

Been very absorbed into it and will continue to be for awhile.  As a sequel, it does a decent job, it doesn't feel like a full on "2.0" sequel sort of game because of how much is brought over from BOTW, because it very much is BOTW, just with alot more, but they do a lot to change up the world, they built up the world far more than I expected, the new abilities you get combined with the vehicle stuff is much more fun than the previous games abilities, and I think they did a lot to make the gameplay experience more exciting and varied.  It is a proper sequel for sure, but you could very easily take screenshots of both games in certain ways and make them completely indistinguishable from each other.

I would echo Cartagia in that probably the biggest annoyance of the game are the menu's, I would say interactions can be tedious too (Doing upgrades with gear, health/stamina, and stash size), there was definite room for improvement that they just didn't do.  That being said, it's a great game.  I would say if you weren't fond of BOTW before, I don't think Tears would change your mind, it's an improvement, but very much the same experience. 

For me, I'm mostly happy, I have so far got one of the improvements I was hoping for (Abit better dungeon/boss variety), but we'll see how the rest of the experience goes as I'm a decent chunk of the way through story and done a lot of side stuff, but got a lot to do still before I make the run through the story fully.

[leynos]

 I gave up on it. Not because I think it's bad. It's very well made. Just when BOTW launched I bought it on Wii U not having a Switch yet. I wish I waited. When I did play BOTW it was new, fresh, and exciting but also tedious at times. I scoured that world from top to bottom. Asking me to redo the towers, fill out the map and get my heart and stamina back. I just felt liek deja vu and more places to explore made it feel like more chores to me.

[sworddude]

Thought it was going to be a BOTW 2 but it surpassed my expectations by a hell lot.

explorarion has more depth, two of the biggest flaws are fixed. enemy variety and samey bosses. Bosses are epic again like a classic zelda, way more enemy variety. Music is much improved story and dungeons are superior. Also like how there are more layers to explorationm, the world is more alive and way bigger.

Phsysics are better in this game, more room for experimentation and there is this raw fun factor in terms of flight with a variety of buildable devices. it is a ton of fun that botw doesn't have.

Main hyrule is overhauled and it is packed with tons of new stuff. it's more than a botw 2 for my taste. I don't think I'll be returning to botw after this one.

BOTW was fun but it had some big flaws would place it below quite some 3d zelda's but Tears of the kingdom I'll place as the No1 zelda, fantastic proper zelda game

I was actually attempting a no fast travel challenge run, but the game is so massive and my playtime is so limited I had to abandon it.  If I were a streamer, playing 8 hours a day I could do it, but at 1-2 hours a day I'd never finish.

that's madness

It is a proper sequel for sure, but you could very easily take screenshots of both games in certain ways and make them completely indistinguishable from each other.

That's to be expected when your using the same art style.

I'm personally not playing it and don't have any immediate intention on doing so. I've yet to even finish Breath of the Wild. With that said, I am very casually watching someone else play from time to time. As a spectator, it doesn't seem that fun, but perhaps that's the issue—I'm not the one playing it.[/font]

if your not a huge zelda fan your not missing out if you skip botw and go directly to tears of the kingdom if you ever decide to give 1 of the 2 games a shot. although 1 small advantage that botw has over tears of the kingdom is it being a bit more straight forward in terms of mechanics. but that's all really.

[telekill]

I'm a few hours in... not sure exactly how many. As with BotW, I'm exploring the land for the most part working on getting various shrines and towers done so I can warp wherever I need too later on. The powers are interesting regardless that two are similar. I do miss my bombs though.

Last night, I decided I had had enough with the skirt/kilt thing they gave me at the start and decided to use the Amiibo to get my Twilight Princess outfit (normal green Link outfit). Because Amiibo can only be used once per day and there's no telling in what order you'll get things, I opted to "cheat" a little. Pro tip for those not wanting to wait two weeks for full outfits... you can manually change the day in your Switch settings, boot up the game, use the Amiibo of choice, save your loot, close the game... rinse repeat. Took me about a half hour last night 5/20 to get all three pieces of the Twilight outfit from my Smash Link Amiibo. Turns out, I wouldn't have gotten the full outfit until at least June 1st had I stuck to once per day. Gross. So now, my Link looks appropriate:



Smash Link also got me Epona right off the bat just like in BotW. I did find that after I found my second horse stable, that the horses I had registered in BotW were all still there. So now I have two Epona's. Not sure why you can't just go to your apartment and look in your closet for all the outfits you unlocked during the other game, but I digress.

I'm not sure how Hyrule has changed completely, but it has. Makes no sense to me, but at least it makes it interesting to rediscover things. Looking forward to continuing the adventure.

[Cartagia]

Thanks for the amiibo reminder!  Totally forgot about that functionality.  Better get on it today.

[kamikazekeeg]

Yeah the amiibo stuff is pretty annoying to deal with, I wish they had stopped doing that, but I found out something interesting, in that you can seemingly find all the amiibo gear in game this time.  The paraglider fabric I think is amiibo only, but I've found multiple outfit parts so far, which is great as I don't own the Smash Bros Amiibo anymore and I'm missing a Toon Link and Skyward Sword Link.

[dhaabi]

As a spectator to someone playing, my initial thoughts were largely in regard to the beginning hours. It seems then that the game heavily focuses on the crafting/fusing system which does not seem all that appealing to me. Perhaps I would enjoy it, but it seems cumbersome, and I generally am not drawn to those kinds of gameplay mechanics. That being said, as I've watched more of the game, it seems less of a focus which is nice to see, personally.

I'm personally not playing it and don't have any immediate intention on doing so. I've yet to even finish Breath of the Wild. With that said, I am very casually watching someone else play from time to time. As a spectator, it doesn't seem that fun, but perhaps that's the issue—I'm not the one playing it.

if your not a huge zelda fan your not missing out if you skip botw and go directly to tears of the kingdom if you ever decide to give 1 of the 2 games a shot.

Perhaps I should have clarified that I have played an extensive amount of Breath of the Wild certainly exceeding 100 hours while enjoying it. Unfortunately, though, I got busy for an extended amount of time and never came back to finish the story.

It is a proper sequel for sure, but you could very easily take screenshots of both games in certain ways and make them completely indistinguishable from each other.

That's to be expected when your using the same art style.

Sequels can adopt the same art style as its earlier entries but still look better. I think in this specific instance is that Breath of the Wild was already pushing the Switch hardware to its limits. That was six years ago. Hardware hasn't changed, so comparison shots between the two very much seem as if they're from the same game.

[Cartagia]

As a spectator to someone playing, my initial thoughts were largely in regard to the beginning hours. It seems then that the game heavily focuses on the crafting/fusing system which does not seem all that appealing to me. Perhaps I would enjoy it, but it seems cumbersome, and I generally am not drawn to those kinds of gameplay mechanics. That being said, as I've watched more of the game, it seems less of a focus which is nice to see, personally.

Yeah, I've played quite a bit, and while I have messed around with the building, it's not that required outside of shrines, and even then its nothing that complicated (which is really no different than BotW). It really does give you a lot if freedom in that regard.  Plus once you get far enough you can bookmark and use designs from your history, so you don't have to keep building from scratch.

[kamikazekeeg]

----------Slight spoiler talk if you care about not being exposed to locations in the game--------------

After devoting far too many hours to getting most of the Light Roots in the Depths (I think I'm at like 90% right now), I really wish they had handled this area better.  It's such an awesome place that is crazy they kept pretty secret up till release I feel and I love the idea of it, it feels like an underwater ocean, just without the water and it's overall really creepy and interesting.  The downside is that because it's as big as the overworld, but doesn't have half as many unique locations or things to do or variety to the areas, it feels very repetitive and tedious to explore by a certain point. 

And yes, part of that is probably on me for spending hours at a time getting around down there, but there's useful stuff to find and if doing quests such or finding chest from old maps, it helps to have fast travel locations.  I always try to do the fast travel stuff early, expanding the map as soon as I can in open world games, but there's no reason to have over 100 of these freaking Light Roots to get, many of them are pointless, and there is a ton of copy and paste locations throughout much of the map.  It could almost be considered a bonus zone, if you didn't need to go down there to get Zonai ore, and there are a handful of quests that take you down below and even some unique fights, but they should've cut the Depths down by like 40%, sectioned areas reachable by different chasms, with more uniqueness to the areas to cut down on the emptiness.

Honestly it's kinda comparable to the shrines, like they did cut down on the shrines a tad in TOTK compared to the BOTW, but there are still too many, a number of which are either pointless, being just freebies with no puzzles, or are like tutorial shrines that aren't useful if you miss the shrine early on and by the time you get to them, you don't need to learn how to thrown a weapon or shoot things in the head with arrows.

[sworddude]

The freebie ones are usually hidden in hard locations or hard to get to/outside temple task plus I personally like some free stuff. we got plenty of puzzles anyway

That being said a few of the freebie ones are meming about being free, caught me off guard 

Still with a world this big having to few shrines might be a bad thing aswell. plus your not required of doing em all anyway.

The tutorial ones are fine, I get it for some newcomers it beats a manual for most. plus it's only a couple of em and they go by quick if you already know said things. plus you actually have to perform said tech to beat the stage. Some people might never do it right if they just look at info screen it's a solid way for people to actually master said skills.

DLC for this game is going to be legendary, wonder what we'll get for it








Spoiler

_____________________________

Personally I don't mind the more emptyness in the dark depths to much. It makes sense to me. exploration is pretty spooky there as a result aswell.

[telekill]

I'm less than 10 hours in. I have maybe 40% of the map revealed. Tears of the Kingdom will win my GOTY unless Sony has something up their sleeves to announce coming this year still that will actually grab my attention. So far, they have nothing. No... not a fan of Spiderman in general and never bothered playing the PS4 title. I won't bother with the sequel this year if ever.

[kamikazekeeg]

Having beat the game, done more side stuff, still working on getting the shrines as the reward sounds really cool and I think I've kinda settled on how I feel about the game.

I think overall, this is mostly a better game than BOTW, but at the same time, there's things that aren't the best.  The sky area is cool, but I don't think there's enough of it and there's a lot of copy paste.  The Depths are cool, but there's way too much of it and far too much copy/paste going on.  Dungeons are more unique, but I also think they are abit bland in execution.  I love that we got unique bosses back, but where the Ganon Blights in BOTW were pretty challenging, but uninteresting from a design POV, the new bosses look neat and have a classic feel, but are incredibly easy.  I never really liked the soundtrack much before and it's not really changed.  I'm still very middling on weapon degradation, I didn't hate it before, don't outright hate it now, but I can't say I love fusing.  It's not bad, it's better for the more gimmicky aspects (Rocket shields for lift, arrow attachments), but I think I've hit the point where I'd prefer to go back to non-breaking weapons.  Give us weapon variety, but allow us to keep them, maybe alter them in different ways based on our preferred playstyle.

I also wish they had done more with the story, it's handled the same exact way as BOTW, a lot of flashback stuff and it was never the best before, but I feel like they kinda undercut it with the Sages not being actual characters, you never see them without their masks, except for one, and you don't get that attachment like there was with the Champions.  Not too mention every time you meet one, it's the same story moment repeated over and over.  Ganondorf is cool, but could've used more, like what if there were Flashback scenes you could find throughout the land that gave us more of his story from his point of view? That would've been so great.

There's other small nit picks I could point out, but I've also dumped like 100 hours into the game or something like that lol I clearly really enjoy it, these two games have been a lot of fun, but I think I'm at the point where I want to see the series change. 

I think my new dream game at this point would be something that bridges the feel of Twilight Princess, a more classic structured Zelda,  with some of the openness and freedom of BOTW/TOTK.  They could do this with a new setting or if they feel like continuing with this Zelda and Link, something I'm 100% okay with, take them to an island, a whole new land and story to deal with, but the map is like a quarter the size of BOTW and it has underwater settings to explore around the island, which would be the big gimmick for the game.  Focus on quality, rather than quantity.  I don't need to dump 100+ hours into a Zelda game, I'm cool with a tighter, more interesting, 40 to 50 hours lol