The explanation for why totk’s story is so Not Great and how disconnected from its predecessor it feels being that the devs didn’t want to alienate new players who didn’t know anything about botw’s story just falls apart the more I think about it. Nothing from this stupid half a plot works unless the player is familiar with specific details from the better games that came before it.
The believability of Link and Zelda’s connection to each other hinges on you knowing about the nuance of their relationship in botw. The ancient sages fighting with the champions’ arms and divine beast helms will only be impactful to botw/aoc players because totk doesn’t bother to explain the significance of that callback at all. Fi’s cameo is meaningless unless you either got every memory in botw or finished the master trial dlc (and know about her from skyward sword). You’ll only get the full context of Teba being sidelined in favour of a 12-year old if you played a specific chapter of Age of Calamity’s second DLC. Like sorry but I think Nintendo just made a bad story tbh
something about a duology where the first book is very clearly structured and organized, and the second book is just a lot more unhinged and chaotic, just EATS for me
kingdom hearts is like ‘here’s a complex web of profound gentle loving platonic relationships between a bunch of tragic kids that are so deeply and divinely intimate that they’ll bring you to tears just thinking about them’ and people wonder why this story has such a chokehold on me
super fucked up for them to make mipha's last words to link "Save her, Link. Save the princess. Save Princess Zelda," when she is arguably the princess he failed to save btw. if you even care.