1+ month later, which do you think is better: BOTW or TOTK?

Which was better?

  • Breath of the Wild

    Votes: 49 21.0%

  • Tears of the Kingdom

    Votes: 184 79.0%
  • Total voters
    233
After spending TONS of time on both games, and beating them both, I feel like TotK is easily the superior game, but for some reason BotW is still my personal favorite of the two. It just had fewer frustrating moments for me.
 
Aldric said:
Breath of the Wild and I don't think it's close.

I've enjoyed TotK a lot and I think it's better than 90% of other games released nowadays but I have no idea why people keep parroting the notion it "fixed BotW" or that it's a much better version of the original. It's not. It's not BotW but better, it's BotW but more. It lacks the coherence, purity and uniqueness of the original. The feeling of discovery isn't there, not just in terms of the environments but also mechanically, these moments of pure wonder when you realized the possibilities offered by that new Zelda formula.

Breath of the Wild is one of the greatest video games of all time, Tears of the Kingdom is "only" a very good game.
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I totally agree that ToTK lacks the magic you get for exploring a world for the first time.
However because you enjoyed it more doesn't make it better. If someone plays tears of the kingdom first I think it would be far better.
 
TOTK is one of those games that supersedes the original in every way to the point that it renders the original obsolete.

BOTW was great.
TOTK is greater.

The bar for future Zelda games is set very high -- hopefully not impossibly so.
 
So far, I'm with TOTK - still about 15% or so of what I think the game may offer. So much stuff to do. I'm just chipping off a little by little. Just finished the 2nd dungeon (1st the airship, and 2nd the fire dungeon) - so I cannot really say that I experienced everything yet.
I still like the older characters though. No Waifu fish, no life! ;) Joking aside, their tragic story and Rivali's asinine arrogance and all - I kinda liked them more than current ones that I've met so far.

Only thing is I feel a bit overwhelmed by how much I can do in this world. Being that I like to complete all the side quests, (and I did everything in BOTW except compendium & Koroks) - including all the DLCs - this game seems to have at least double the amount things to do... and all that crafting fun. So every day, I'm just doing just a bit by bit. It may take about a year for me to finish the game... and that's the downside!
 
LakeOf9 said:
Im always curious about this, why did Tears work for you when BOTW didnt? Was it any one big thing, or just all the smaller changes TOTK makes coming together to make you like it more?
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No one big thing. Just the small little things. The puzzles just seemed to click more with the time rewind and the ultrahand. I still hate the weapon durability thing. Stops me from putting this in my upper echelon.
 
This is an interesting question

TotK is objectively better and larger, but I enjoyed BOTW more due to the newness factor

Both games suffer the same flaws but I'd say TotK has a tad better dungeons and bosses

My first playthrough of BOTW felt magical; much less so with TotK
 
Spent 100+ hours on both, never beat either, but I will say, Tears Destroys BOTW and only cements how BOTW was a WILD fucking experiment by NIntendo that bore Fruit, imo. This game is the evolution of BOTW and more. I'm a bit excited to see how they iterate on this awesomeness. They still need to get classic style dungeons in there, somehow, some fucking way... I'll check out the next game, more than likely, for sure, but after that, if no classic dungeons? I may abandon this series. I'm not getting any younger, and the wait for classic dungeons starts NOW... for me.
 
First, BOTW was my all time #3. Was.

Secondly, I haven't finished TOTK yet but at this point it's so good that I'm not sure there is any reason for me to ever play BOTW again.
 
Raven117 said:
No one big thing. Just the small little things. The puzzles just seemed to click more with the time rewind and the ultrahand. I still hate the weapon durability thing. Stops me from putting this in my upper echelon.
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I think they definitely need to think about durability in the next game. I think Fuse does help the problem a little but they need to allow us to repair weapons, even if the material cost is super high for balance reasons.

anyway thank you for your answer
 
LakeOf9 said:
I think they definitely need to think about durability in the next game. I think Fuse does help the problem a little but they need to allow us to repair weapons, even if the material cost is super high for balance reasons.

anyway thank you for your answer
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Man, I'd love that.
 
BoTW have special place in my heart. ToTK is bigger, better but also much more noisy in a sence.
I find a hard time to create a mind map of the wrold, to orient where I'm and where i want to go.
The world is much more vertical and the movement of Link supports that. Minute to minute there is mutch more to do.
And the Art Direction of BoTW is better orchastrated. I really didn't like the visuals design of the new shrines (the entrance).
Zonites are cool
 
Tears is better, but I still got bored of it so I'm taking a break from playing it.

Same thing happened with BotW and I came back to finish it later.
 
TotK by a long shot. I played BotW twice and this game was so much better. I am still mourning the fact that I beat it and haven't really played anything since, apart from Diablo in couch coop mode.
 
mhirano said:
Should play BOTW first or jump straight to TOTK?
I have both but played only 3-4 hours of BOTW a while ago
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Keep playing botw, it's still an amazing game, it will make you appreciate a lot of the changes in totk, and they change up so much in totk that it wouldn't feel redundant after you finish botw
 
Tears of the kingdom in it and itself is breath of the wild and evolved.

Pokemon Evolve GIF
 
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I miss rivalis gale, the cool dungeons that you could change the literal dungeon configuration of, and the shrines were harder to find and more interesting. You can cheese most of these shrines. Other than those things, totk is much better.
 
Pretty shocked how many people can pick one over the other easily. I mean to me, they are basically the same game. I don't feel like their is drastic improvement from one to other (and I don't mean that as a bad thing, as BoTW was great).

If I had to absolutely pick, probably BoTW, just as it seemed a little more focused. I looked at my time played the other day between the 2 and I have about 20 more hours in ToTK but haven't even beaten it yet and I don't really view that as a positive as it just seems to have more filler. I'm also having trouble picking it back up. Think I've gone about 2 weeks without touching it at this point. The sky worlds and depths are pretty cool at first, but you kind of realize that they are just a copy/paste and of each other and it losses it charm rather quick.

I think another area where I would give an ever so slight edge to BoTW is that ToTK didn't improve in the main areas I wanted it to. The temples are still dog shit (seriously, how do some of you think they are a major improvement to divine beasts, which also sucked). They are the same thing. Get to area, hit 5 terminals, in which you have to solve a couple of puzzles. Rinse and repeat. I would say though, getting to the temples in ToTK might be the high part in the series for me, specially the water and wind temple. Just the areas and challenges there were awesome.
 
Just beat it last night. Tears of the kingdom is so good it elevates breath of the wild to making you want to replay that again too. They are like a part one and two of one movie Game of the generation is tears of the kingdom.

Just the boss fights in TOTK blow BOTW out if the water. We got actual unique designs and ways of fighting them vs just blobs that all die with arrows. The temples actually have a theme to them vs just identical mechanical buildings. There is an actual active world around you rather than everything happened 100 years ago so today you are just trying to fight ganon.
 
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TikiLagoonSam said:
Just beat it last night. Tears of the kingdom is so good it elevates breath of the wild to making you want to replay that again too. There are like a part one and two of one movie Game of the generation is tears of the kingdom.
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What's crazy is that TotK actually makes the first game pretty much irrelevant on every level. That's a first for the Zelda series.
 
For me, I think BotW is the better game.

TotK recycles too much from BotW. I'm totally fine with them using the same world, it is a direct sequel after all. But everything else? It is kind of disappointing. In terms of what I mean by recycled:

In BotW you are lead through the tutorial area by the ghost of the last king of Hyrule, where you clear a few shrines to get your abilities for the rest of the game.
In TotK you are lead through the tutorial area by the ghost of the first king of Hyrule, where you clear a few shrines to get your abilities for the rest of the game.

In BotW, you travel to specific areas where you take a picture to unlock cutscenes showing what happened in the past.
In TotK, you travel to specific areas where you find the pool of water to unlock cutscenes showing what happened in the past.

etc etc.
How original. At least BotW felt new in these regards.


In regards to the story, the story present in TotK is absolute trash. I am sorry.
In BotW, the relationship between the past and present made sense, and was more relevant to the main story. The characters in the past actually had meaning to the world, to Link, and to Zelda. 100 years ago, was the time that Link and Zelda actually lived. There are characters in the present who were alive back then. The two times are linked together.
In TotK, it's like they just wanted to have things happen even further in the past, because everything needs to be "bigger" than in BotW. But it all ends up being completely uninteresting. Who were the warriors in the past in TotK? Who knows! Not important, apparently.
I could go on about the story, but I don't want to get too much into spoiler territory.
I'll just say a lot of it feels like they simply want a cheap set up for another Hyrule Warriors game, rather than actually trying to make an interesting Zelda story.


The gameplay is also kind of disappointing.
The ability to build all sorts of crazy shit is really cool. It's amazing what they've done here. But... it also kind of breaks the game. Stamina and shit doesn't even matter any more. Horses don't matter. Just build a plane and fly to the next tower. Or shoot yourself in to the sky, glide as far as you can, then do it again till you're there.
They tried putting in dungeons, but they are often easily broken by the abilities.
It feels like you are just cheesing your way through the game half the time. Like they created these crazy abilities, but didn't really know how to balance the world around them. It's fun, sure. But I never really got the same feeling of accomplishment.

But by far, the worst part is you can't cross dress as a gerudo girl any more. What the hell Nintendo????

I think it is a good game, but hopefully the next Zelda game is a bit more grounded.
 
I absolutely loved BOTW, but as far as the powers go, I pretty much only used stasis and that was it. I am always using and enjoying all of the powers in TOTK. Also getting around the map is so much easier and enjoyable. Fusion is awesome. Overall TOTK is just much more fluid and fun to play.
 
StueyDuck said:
Both the same 🤷‍♂️

They both have amazing first 5-10 hrs then fall off a cliff after that
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Damn came to say the same thing verbatim.

First 5 hours, you feel the magic, anything can happen like this grand journey awaits you.

Then slowly you see the template and the seams began to unravel.

I like ToTK, but more often than not I'm struggling to find the actual content. I waste so much time looking for the fun and when you have little free time, you get REAL frustrated when you waste it.

In open world games I like to explore an area pretty well before moving on so I feel I didn't miss content or I "earned' the next part of the map. With this, I couldn't find much else to do so I just went to the next dungeon. I was really trying to save the dungeons since theres only 4 I think but I just felt time was being massively wasted. What this game needs is a Legit main quest you can follow, in addition to the other stuff. The game really doesn't have that much focused content.
 
If BOTW had Ascend, I may be tempted to say it's better.
Both have their strengths. They complement each other in that part of the charm in TOTK is to see how the world changed between the two episodes. Sure, discovering Hyrule in BOTW was incredible. But the traversal could be a true chore at times.

TOTK feels more formulaic, but it plays much better. The added verticality is simply amazing - skydiving from a sky island is always a thrill. There's less repetition in the shrines. The strong monsters are way more challenging, those Gleeoks are something else. The ability to craft new weapons means you're unlikely to have to leave a place to return later; it really feels like you can solve any problem at any time, whereas in BOTW, sometimes you simply lacked the necessary tools. And the story in TOTK is more interesting, more epic, and it's told way better.

It's an Ocarina/Majora situation again. The first has an unparalleled sense of wonder, but the second is a much more intricate and interesting game with intriguing mechanics and a more powerful story.
 
I was super late to the party and played BOTW for the first time like a month ago, finished it and then bought TOTK recently.

I wasn't blown away by BOTW and while it was a cool, fun and solid game it is overrated for me. There just wasn't much to keep me interested outside the fantastic Divine Beasts missions and the main story. It's like an 8/10 at most.

TOTK on the other hand just clicked with me almost instantly - the new abilities are so much fun and really spark my imagination. The world feels so much more interesting to explore, MUCH less barren and empty and there are a lot of small changes which add up to more than its parts.

Also, I just like the vibe of the world better as well. The added verticality of the sky and the underground is amazing, loving it so far.

Granted, I've only played for a few hours so we'll see what the verdict is later. But so far I feel much more motivated to explore the world and just do stuff, unlike in BOTW.
 
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TOTK improved on everything BOTW did, it also gave us a huge amount of new environments to explore, the fuse abilities gives the player limitless options in how to play the game.
 
Totk is better in most aspects BotW was new and exciting.

Also sky towers made exploration a bit worse IMO. You can just fly to every new location/shrine.
 
I'm still playing Tears, and I'm enjoying it, but I think it's the most disappointing direct sequel Zelda game. Playing BotW before it does it a disservice because the overworld is so similar/borrowed. I can't be interested in exploring the ground level because I've just been everywhere before in BotW. Even though I played BotW on launch and never replayed it, it's still too easy to feel I've "been there and done that." Exploring the sky is the most fun I've had. The depths are ok, but are either a slog on foot, or trivialized by hover-biking to each light root.

Tears just feels like BotW with even more overpowered abilities, and doesn't have much of a identity of it's own. Compare that to OoT and MM. MM reused assets, but made a whole new setting and gimmicks and the game definitely had its own identity. TotK feels like a BotW expansion.

This is disheartening because I feel Nintendo is one of the few developers that make sequels with variety and uniqueness in mind, and therefore make each game valid in their own way. TotK basically invalidates/makes BotW obsolete, which isn't a good thing imo. Look at discussion, for example, of every 3D game from OoT to SS. Each game has their own identity with pros and cons and fans will argue and have favorites. I doubt discourse between BotW and TotK will be as interesting. It's basically BotW felt "New" and more memorable, and TotK was just an iteration.

And Tears doesn't fix BotW's problems, it just adds "more." Instead of making bigger, better dungeons, they're just as short and easy as BotW. They could've kept the number of shrines the same or slightly less than BotW while using more time and effort on making better main dungeons, but instead they doubled down and gave the game even more shrines. It's just "more BotW" which isn't bad, but I don't know if I feel like even completing all the shrines like I did in BotW. And those are the mini dungeons and what I'd consider the main draw of the game.
 
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