Topic: The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom

I played TOTK first time from May to July, and formed some strong opinions about it then. Over the course of the next few months my view on the game soured considerably, I felt it was offensively derivative of BOTW and a lazy effort, maybe one of the laziest from Nintendo.

But I started another save file in November, and took a few months break from that, picked it up again a few days ago. My opinion’s changed again; and I’ve come full circle to believe this game is truly a masterpiece, or at worse very close to one.

Funny, you can land on the fan plane of the head Yiga Clan guy, and he won't hurt you. He just keeps casting his spell with that Doctor-Strange-like arm motions. XD

How does fusing a zonai fan degrade a mighty zonai shield so fast? I didn't even hit anything with it. I wanted to clear some piles of sand, so I fused a fan to my shield, and after I cleared about five sand piles, the fan and shield shattered. What on earth is that all about? The shield seems to last longer if I keep fusing rockets to it over and over. What's your logic Nintendo? It's the dumbest thing I've seen in the game.

Things I recently did:
-Found all 12 ancient tablets & had them translated.
-I think I've gotten the treasure chests at virtually all Yiga fortresses in the depths. I've found virtually all light roots. Before I shut off the game, I came across an ancient forge construct occupied by the Yiga master, this may be my final encounter/battle with him in this quest - I could be wrong, we'll see.
-Max upgraded the gloom resistant armor from bargainer statues.
-I still keep putting off doing volcano and gerudo desert regional phenomena because, I keep finding other fun things to do. I need to do these to advance the game.

i'll hop back on totk soon.

@jedgamesguy
Yeah, sometimes we just need a little break from a game. When you played it for the first time, from May to July, did you like it at first, or did you force yourself a little bit, to play the game?

@jedgamesguy I love this, it's so interesting how time away can help shape an experience. I played TOTK nonstop from release to about late September, stopped after finding all lightroots and shrines. Haven't been back in months, I think now would make a great time to start trying to build the crazy ideas that I had, but not attempting due to wanting to save resources. I put more time into this than BOTW, and had a blast accomplishing both the shrines & lightroots. To me, this game lands ahead of BOTW - I love the ability to create, and really enjoyed the depths and the caves.

Random thing to bring up, but while TOTK's English voice acting has been the best of the three games (including Age of Calamity), Riju's dialogue while doing this specific Gerudo town mainline quest is weirdly maybe the best performance I've heard thus far. Which is funny since it happens during gameplay and thus is easier to not pay attention to but there is passion to it that I've not heard in most of these games.

But it does still feel like Nintendo hated the idea of paying any voice actor for more than a day's work, so the game still avoids having her or anyone voice acting when they can avoid it, which is a dumb and bad thing games need to stop doing. I maintain this opinion, either have all voice acting for a character, or none at all, this in-between thing always takes me out of the experience, stop it.

it's literally this joke except some of the cutscenes still don't have voice acting because reasons

@kkslider5552000 They way I perceive Nintendo's game development & voice acting, it seems to be in game producer's benefit when they avoid extensive voice acting, and to rely more on non verbal vocalizations, because it's ton of work, time & money to make a great game for multiple languages.

When we read most of the dialog in game, our imagination applies our own idealized acting onto it and there's no mass criticism from the internet. While, if you have all the dialog voice acted, one language usually becomes the best version, and other languages suffer, or may not translate as well. It's so hard to please everyone. So, That's the beauty of Splatoon and their gibberish squid verbalizations, or Zelda's Link only having vocal nonverbal sounds, or why Mario rarely has anything to say (voice-acting-wise) in a game. Nintendo can focus on making the best version of a game they can, and it can be sold in other countries around the world, and we'll all get the same experience, more or less.

I think that's what Nintendo's logic has been.

@WoomyNNYes ok then don't bother with voice acting in the first place, is my issue. The decision to only use a little bit of voice acting has always felt like it only exists to market the game as new and modern and AAA rather than to sincerely add to the game in any way.

Voice acting in Latin American Spanish was somewhat of a mixed bag in this one, the sound mixing is often off, and music/action drowns the voices.

Mineru’s lines in particular are just really hard to hear.

Spoiler free:

Hadn't done Gerudo regional phenomena yet. Wow, the early quest, Riju of Gerudo Town, is freaking awesome! I'm glad I screwed it up & died, now I can replay it! It's awesome! I can't wait to play TOTK again.

Actually, should I still do Goron CIty regional phenomena before Gerudo? Maybe it doesn't really matter. I've already completed Rito & Zora. Progress-wise, I'm pretty strong, got maxed out gear, 60-100 damage weapons, 4 lynel bows, and lots of arrows, bombs.

@WoomyNNYes yoooo i feel the exact same about the early Riju quest! so fun!

I think the Gerudo quest is the best one in both games tbh. I think this one might be better overall, even though it was probably shorter (or at least it felt shorter). Best temple too.

Also related to that, one of the low points of Wind Waker is that one mirror puzzle room in the Earth Temple because it just takes too long (at least that's how I remember it), so the quick pace of similar puzzles in this game is good.

That's a good point, I'd agree that the fact it was a new Zelda game meant I had certain expectations before it came out. I loved the game in the moment but after I beat it I definitely started to think about it more negatively, since it was so derivative of Breath of the Wild. I thought better of the game the more I played the second time round, especially from a design and technical front.

Absolutely, time did a lot to mellow my opinion on the game but taking time away both times had very different outcomes lmao. My problem both times was that I'm not the kind of person to experiment with crazy vehicles or mechanical combos, but the game leaves enough random parts lying around that people like me still play the game as intended. Part of me's tempted to even go back to Breath of the Wild, because that game had better shrines and offers a different, grounded challenge compared to this new one. I imagine playing it would really help me appreciate the differences between it and TOTK.

@jedgamesguy I think you nailed it - I didn't find/beat 100% of the shrines, and they were definitely more challenging in BOTW. I will probably wait until Switch 2, revisit both, if the rumors of performance boosting/backwards compatibility are true, and make it a back-to-back replay. I could never make it very far in the BOTW Trial Of The Sword on Master Mode, it would be good to accomplish that, along with the shrines.

@Lazz Yeah the downside of TOTK’s shrines is that they were so focused on the game’s physics mechanics that the puzzles themselves were pretty basic. There were also tons more blessing shrines, some of which were placed in locations that didn’t pose any kind of challenge to reach lmao. The skydiving, towers and Zonai devices also makes travelling the world so much easier and I imagine I’ll stop taking it for granted when I play BOTW again.

@jedgamesguy 100% - The shrines were easier in TOTK. At least they had zero motion control physics puzzles, I really didn't enjoy some of the BOTW physics shrines.
One area of TOTK that I realized I didn't do enough of is simply walking through/exploring the open world in the same way as BOTW. I found myself flying to locations far more often, like you mention. I'm not sure if I'll have the patience to walk from location to location in BOTW, and I'll miss the UltraHand.

Rather than working on the beginning of the Gerudo regional phenomena, I went back to play the Goron City regional phenomena to get it out of the way. I'm glad I got it out of the way. Goron temple is the weakest of the three temples I've done. I thought the mine cart stuff from the Direct made look like fun, but they are tedious. Anyway, glad volcano temple is done, because that Yunobo sage power gained from it will be quite helpful.

On another topic, I tried bomb flower farming, the method of Taking the bomb from the backpack-bokoblin's hand before he can throw it. It worked first time. Easy to set up, and you can mindlessly press the A button for "Take" to keep farming the bombs. That's how I'm going to get bombs from now on!👌 Before now, I used the hang glider duplication method for version 1.1.1, and the caveat there is, the bombs can end up blowing up if they drop onto the ground too hard & you lose them 5, 10 bombs at a time.

Very surprised flower lady doesn't get mad in TOTK like she did in BOTW. I found the flower lady from BOTW still resides on Floret Sandbar island (Hyrule), but she didn't get mad if I messed with her garden 3+ times in Tears of the Kingdom. When I saw that she was there in TOTK, I was looking forward to pushing her over the edge, but it didn't work. A bit disappointed.

@WoomyNNYes The lady in question is called Magda. Some players gave her the nickname Flowerblight Ganon, on account of her aggressive attitude, and there's a game mod where you can fight her as a boss.

She's calmed down a bit by TotK, but there's a sidequest related to her called The Missing Farm Tools. It's one of the ones you get from Penn, after meeting him at the Lucky Clover Gazette.