- Joined
- Sep 29, 2020
Played TOTK for about ~9 hours now, thought I'd give some thoughts for those looking for different opinions. I'm not a Zelda fanatic, I've played through some of the games and enjoyed them. I wasn't too fond of BOTW; started out excited enough for me to buy it after playing someone else's copy for a few hours. The developers obsessively compared it to Zelda 1 because you can go wherever, and I became disappointed as I slowly realized the other main aspect of Zelda 1 was not here: there aren't cool dungeons and items hidden around for you to find when exploring. Shrines are not that, not even close.
That's really the main thing I wanted: mysterious dungeons & temples scattered or hidden throughout the world, each with some different lore, containing some cool treasure or tool. Imagine the Goddess Temple in that valley or that dragon's mouth in the jungle but they were actually dungeons, that sort of thing. No set linear questline or 100 cutscenes like the series eventually became. So, I wanted a modern 3D version of Zelda 1. Like they claimed it was. Crazy, I know.
So far, my opinion on TOTK is:
That's really the main thing I wanted: mysterious dungeons & temples scattered or hidden throughout the world, each with some different lore, containing some cool treasure or tool. Imagine the Goddess Temple in that valley or that dragon's mouth in the jungle but they were actually dungeons, that sort of thing. No set linear questline or 100 cutscenes like the series eventually became. So, I wanted a modern 3D version of Zelda 1. Like they claimed it was. Crazy, I know.
So far, my opinion on TOTK is:
- It's closer to Zelda 1 than BOTW was (in some aspects), but it's still not close. There aren't dungeons hidden around to find when exploring, just more Shrines, so I'm not interested.
- The temple I did (after a big required Questline) was okay, it wasn't a big fucking robot and actually had some enemies in it, so that's nice, but still lacking. It did feel like a mysterious temple, I like that.
- The beginning is quite a slog, and once you get to Hyrule make sure you start doing the main questline shit, otherwise you won't have the paraglider or towers activated.
- Not too fond of building things, kind of finicky to get working properly, just not that interested in the concept.
- I really like Fusing, especially Fusing Zonai to equipment. It feels like you have cool items, but they all look like utter shit (many of the weapons look black & tarnished, then you put a fucking rock or another shit tarnished weapon on top).
- Combat is still kind of crap, but I think I'm willing to play around with the cool Zonai stuff enough to make it fun. Still needs more enemy types, where the fuck are stuff like Darknuts, Dodongos, or those Sword & Shield wyvern things from TP?
- The user flow for Fusing weapons or items is long and so fucking tedious (e.g. Elemental Arrow = Arrow + Elemental item: must manually open the menu for every single arrow, resets if aiming is cancelled, choose item from the ENTIRE materials category organized in one endlessly long line).
- It feels much more tedious in general: Stamina takes longer to recover so it's longer to get around, the game interrupts you every time you pick up a new item (including every weapon fuse variation
), lots of other UX shit like that.
- Even not playing the death out of BOTW and not playing it for a while, the map feels a bit too similar to me. Maybe just the specific places I've gone though, some have felt different.
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