Support NeoGAF

[Elios83]

Imo the open world formula sucks and TotK feels pretty much like an expansion of the previous game.
Hopefully some people will stop with the bootlicking for everything Nintendo does so the message arrives that randomly go on a map fighting with stamina and breaking weapons is not fun at all.

 

[Mossybrew]

No

 

[EverydayBeast]

Nintendo was very gracious with TOTK, it didn't feel like a Switch game even though we know it was on that limited hardware. Tears of the kingdom was money well spent.

 

[AngelMuffin]

Not another one of these “does it get any better” posts about a universally acclaimed game.

It might not be for you…and that’s ok.

 

[KXVXII9X]

I don't think it will get any better from where you are. I thought the opening hours of the game was the strongest tbh. The game has a lot of great ideas, but the more I play, the more flaws I find.

If the new mechanics aren't grabbing you now, I don't see the game interesting you at all. Especially when you get further out and find out the characters from last game are inconsistent and some remember you while other don't and reuse of the same cutscene. 100 hours in and the rewards for chest and exploration are worth less than the resources you use to get them.

You probably haven't been to the depths which is interesting. You will find it repetitive 90% of the time with some cool surprises here and there. The temples are "ok." My favorite is the Wind Temple by FAR. The leading up to it was one of my favorite moments from the series. The lightning temple wasn't as bad either. The other temples felt horrible by comparison. I especially hated the fire temple and the water one was forgettable but had a cool but tedious puzzle to get to it.

I think the game would be much better with a linear story and less padding.

 

[MAX PAYMENT]

Damn. I considered one of the best games I'd played In a long time.

 

[Valedix]

Stopped after 70hrs so nope

 

[Dr. Claus]

The game is amazing from the outset. If you don't like it after 10 hours or so - stop playing and move on. Not all games are for everyone.

 

[Jsisto]

Same situation.

Breath of the Wild is true to its name. The perfection of the open world wilderness. Give you a few tools and let you discover everything organically. Nothing lacking nothing overstaying its welcome, just pure perfect balance throughout. Pure unadulterated gameplay, nothing is just easy but it isn't artificially complicated.

Tears of the Kingdom, so far, is irritating to say the least. What could perfectly be ONE step, it's dragged into several steps depending what you have or not. What broke me is having to do at least 6 steps just to be able to fight a rock armored base fucking goblin which would have taken just one step, which turned just seeing it and go rape it into a 5 min search for s fucking rock to fuse with anything.

Having more story it's very welcome, but all that fusing and building it's just screaming to me 'GTFO old boy, this shit is for the Roblox/Minecraft/Sandbox next generation retardos, the princess gameplay you're looking for is in another century castle'.

While BOTW was, in Eiji Aonuma's words 'see that up high? You can get there' simplicity, given you have Stamina, TOTK is the same but with an irritating mechanics/gameplay twist drag 'see that? You can get there...but not before searching for, then glueing together the three near logs together several tens of meters apart, then, go to that platform over there with your contraption and glue it on top, then bring that rotten monstrosity to that lame ass hill to climb the logs and at the platform at the top, swim up to it'

This isn't our Zelda. This is the Zelda for the newer generations.

Basically BoTw but now you can glue trees together and attach an apple to your sword for….true freedom! Thanks Nintendo.

 

[Rockondevil]

I think it’s one of, if not the only Zelda game I haven’t finished.

 

[SlimeGooGoo]

.

 

[Soodanim]

In zelda is even worse because combat is terrible and you only waste weapons when fighting and there is really nothing worth to find in 90% of cases so just going from point a to b was boring as fuck, and the horse were some of the worst horse in any open world game, i know people like to suck nintendo for their perfect gameplay or some shit, but gameplay wise the zelda have a lot of amateur hour flaws starting with the combat and ending with the control scheme...

This is really the main point for me about BotW, which I've tried to play differently multiple times.

The best I can get out of it is not exploring on foot unless necessary, making a beeline for Zelda's horse, and using that to ride on the rails/roads to major destinations. But first, straight to the Master Sword to use the glitch and get that early.

After that, go to the air dungeon for the super jump to help skip the godawful climbing this game has. Then onto others as you see fit, only stopping if you see something you want to stop for. And by that I mean a dungeon for an upgrade piece, because anything on land that isn't a quest is a waste of time.

In short, the best I can get from BotW is to play around its flaws as much as possible.

Exploration has no reward unless you want to 100% the game, and combat is almost always a net loss. At least if you get the MS early you don't go into encounters knowing you're guaranteed to come out of it with less than you went in.

The only combat that is worth it is the Lionel Ritchie centaurs. Hello, yes it is you I'm looking for - you're the only thing that's going to give me decent loot.

I haven't played TotK, but some of the upgrades they made seem like obvious reactions to the game so often being a net loss. It's not so much of a problem if you can glue a boulder to a bad sword, at least you can experiment for variety and give yourself upgrades. Even the BotW DLC was a reaction: the big empty world is easier to get around on a fast motorbike.

Maybe if they're not going to do a v1.6 of that same map again the next Zelda can condense the world into something with a better ratio of exploring to rewards. That is assuming TotK didn't massively improve in that area, but I haven't heard anything to suggest that.

 

[ByWatterson]

A game of maximum player expression with very little reason to do any of it.

I played the whole thing and really enjoyed it, but looking back, all I see is a slog. If you don't like it now, that won't change.

 

[JohnnyTropics]

Tears of the Kingdom answered a life-long question of mine that I first asked when StarTropics 2 was released, and then asked again when I finally got to play Final Fantasy 8 (after waiting for what felt like years after experiencing my first rpg in Final Fantasy 7), Deus Ex 2, WarCraft 3 (I played 1:OvH later), Chrono Cross, and many others--and that question was: why can't sequels be in the exact same form as their predecessor, on the same map, with merely a continuation of the story?

It turns out that a fresh coat of paint, with stylistic call backs to the OG, fulfills the soul more than ctrl-cing the OG and changing the font.

 

[Kenpachii]

Game feels more of the same. It's great if you want more zelda botw gameplay. I had fun with it for about 20 hours or so then i got tired of the endless same world kinda.

The game would have been better if they had a whole new world to explore. I just felt off checkboxing area's i already seen before.

 

[LordNerevar76]

Lots of hot takes here, although I know opinions are pretty varied on Tears. I understand if the gameplay formula doesn't click for everyone, and I personally wish they had created a brand new world but this is the next best thing.

If you don't like it by now you probably won't, but I will say TOTK took a little bit more for me to get into compared to BOTW (I loved both games). The big thing that ended up convincing me on TOTK was the sheer amount of handcrafted content in the form of far superior quests compared to BOTW and the caves and wells. The quests are the main thing I see you did not mention, so you may want to check out some of the stables. They act like quest hubs.

 

[nordique]

Tears of the Kingdom is the last game I wasn’t able to put down. From start to end I loved that game a lot

I would say if it’s not to your taste OP I don’t think it will change. I’m a huge Zelda fan so it was a “full course meal” for myself, but as with any game, I can understand if it’s not for you

 

[Damigos]

Zelda, story heavy? Are you serious?! WTF

Well, there s A story, there s lore, theres books etc etc..maybe not heavy indeed

 

[PatientGamer]

It's a really average, overrated experience from what I've seen and heard.

 

[tamago84]

Same..getting old..only thing i enjoy are stuff like balatro and sts. No story, no hour long walking trails

 

[Boss Man]

IMO botw and totk are possibly the best games ever made but no if you don’t like it after 10 hours it won’t get better.

 

[ResurrectedContrarian]

• Roam around
• Find random caves/shrines/encampments and complete them
• Upgrade your health/stamina
• Gather and build/upgrade weapons and items that you find
• Build various contraptions or vehicles to cross rivers/ravines/etc..
• Run into random people who give you very vague hints of where a side-adventure might take place
• Complete various optional activities around the world like following/harvesting the glowing blue rabbit, fixing that one guys sign that he keeps trying to put up, etc..

Almost that entire list would be a very accurate description of what we do in tabletop AD&D for hundreds of hours. Reading it, my honest reaction is "yeah that sounds perfect"

 

[Dr. Wilkinson]

I found it a bit of a slog, honestly. But to be fair I just wasn't in the mood to do what looked a bunch of reruns of BotW shrines in a different motif, and build a bunch of contraptions with glue. I do want to go back to it at some point. I don't enjoy building things in video games. Especially not in a Zelda game. So there being so much of that in TotK was a bummer.

 

[LakeOf9]

It's a really average, overrated experience from what I've seen and heard.

Maybe actually play it?

 

[Chuck Berry]

Im in the camp that sunk dozens of hours and never finished. I had a fuckin blast up until I burned out though that's for damn sure

Also one of the few Zelda's I've never completed

 

[LectureMaster]

Was a huge fan of BOTW and didn't manage to finish TOTK. It was very exciting at the beginning of the game, but they completely killed BOTW's exploration. By making devices or teleport to sky and then skydive anywhere you need to go on the map, it basically removed all the on-land on foot / horse exploration that made BOTW special imo.

This for me. I remember there were a few areas that I needed to seriously plan routes and manage stamina to get to and it was fun.

In totk just go ahead upgrade battery to max and build choppers to fly to anywhere. The sense of exploration is lost.

 

[Big Baller]

I barely used the horse in both games and I finished BOTW twice. On foot or glide.

 

[ResurrectedContrarian]

I barely used the horse in both games and I finished BOTW twice. On foot or glide.

Exploration was so central to me that I also rarely used horses in BOTW, until I had already explored the world and was going back to seek out missed shrines etc.

 

[Musashipan]

Best game ever created
Keep crying

 

[TintoConCasera]

I see.

Well, be sure to give Dragon's Dogma 2 a try one of those days.

Yeah, both Dogmas are definetly better than Zelda TikTok.

 

[Kataploom]

Well, it's great from the very beginning, but if it doesn't click, there's nothing to do OP, just accept it's not for you and play something else

 

[rubenburgt]

I had the same problem.

Exploring wasn't that fun.
Some quests were a bore.
You can be creative but at the end of the day will the build be similar to something you build before.

I don't know when it happened and what caused it but I got hooked on it. Like, I wanted to continue playing even after finishing the story. The shrines, the random boss battles and trying to be creative and destructive with my builds was more fun than I thought.

 

[Mozzarella]

I loved it but New Zelda games dont have much progression, what you see in the tutorial area is generally what 80% of the game is like, so just like BOTW if you dont enjoy the opening area you won't enjoy the rest of it.
The main attraction behind TOTK is the physics engine in how you get to traverse the world and solve puzzles, everything else is just average, the story, combat or exploration are not really that great, they are just decent/serviceable.

 

[Trilobit]

I never want to go back to the linear levels of past Zelda games. At least not in mainline Zelda, topdown ones can have the classic design. Having an open world in BotW was amazing, but I don't think we need the building functions in the next game. Instead I want them to focus on making exploration rewarding and having plenty of fun sidequests that require some serious thinking to solve them.

I want it to feel like a real adventure next time, like as if the world is really hostile, but at least I have my sword and horse. I want to find a little entrance into a cave system in a cleverly obscured place, which isn't required for the main story, but is exciting for explorers.

 

[analog_future]

Tchia was added to Game Pass so I thought I'd give it a try, and I'm already having much more fun with it than I was having with Zelda. It's kind of a Zelda-lite game in some ways, so it's scratching that itch I was looking for.

Plus, it's a pretty gorgeous game. Crazy that a game made by 12 people can look so much better than the newest AAA Zelda. That Switch hardware needs to be replaced ASAP.

Few of my Tchia shots:

 

[iHaunter]

Not really. It was okay. I stopped after about 30 hours. The weapon fusing mechanics was idiotic. They really ran out of material for the second game. Story is always mediocre so don't focus on it.

 

[Pimpbaa]

Game is a $70 expansion pack for BOTW. I played BOTW to death, so TOTK reusing so much assets really bummed me out. Once the building gimmick got old, it felt like I was playing BOTW again for the millionth time.