#totk salt

[blue-likethebird]

Reusing the memory system from botw for the tears of the dragon storyline in totk was such a terrible decision on so many different levels that it’s honestly kind of impressive.

While the botw memory system had flaws of its own, there was one small but significant thing that worked in its favour: botw’s memories were largely separate from the main plot in the past, and have absolutely no bearing on the story being told in the present. Aside from a few specific instances (ie the calamity striking, the ceremony, Link and Zelda becoming closer) the memories are all self-contained moments that emphasize character development over driving the story. Because there’s no major narrative throughline between them, it gives players more freedom to discover in any order regardless of how much they’ve progressed through the main quest without running the risk of stumbling across a memory that ruins something else later on in the game.

(This got long so the rest of my analysis is going under the cut.)

The biggest change between the memories from botw and the dragon’s tears from totk is definitely what kind of information these cutscenes relay to you as the player. Botw’s memories are primarily snapshots of small interpersonal moments that hold very little significance to the greater narrative taking place in the past. Totk’s memories are the greater narrative. With only one major exception -that I’ll touch on in a sec-, every cutscene in the dragon’s tears shows a crucial moment of story development with no time left to explore the characters driving that story forwards. There’s no organic moment revealing, say, a quirk of Rauru’s that Mineru finds annoying, or Sonia’s sense of humour, or any of our literal Main Villain Ganondorf’s motivations for going to war with Hyrule. If there’s any moments of character focus they only happen in ways that advance the plot (meaning the only real character focus is on the characters totk wants the entire universe to orbit around, namely Rauru and Zelda), and as such it’s harder to bring myself to care about what happens to anyone.

To illustrate the point I’m trying to make here, compare the memories of the champions Link regains during the divine beast quests to the conversations with the ancient sages at the end of each temple. The memories make passing mentions of the ongoing preparations for the calamity, but the real purpose of those scenes is to showcase who the champions were as people before their deaths and give us a reason to mourn them, even though we know at the start of our journey that they’re all long gone. In contrast, the conversations with the ancient sages are all about the events of the imprisoning war and their promise to Zelda that their descendants will come to Link’s aid in the future, very obviously copy pasted for each of the five times that cutscene is brought up (which is a particularly egregious moment of bad quest design but that’s a rant for another time) in such a way that none of the 5 incarnations of that cutscene reveal anything new about the ancient sages as characters, to the point where none of them even show their faces. I care about Daruk because the game shows me that he cares deeply about the wellbeing of his fellow champions and brings out the best in others. So why should I care about the nameless, faceless sage of water? What’s there to move me about their struggles if my only interactions with the sages are a series of exposition dumps? If the game can’t give me a reason to sincerely care about its main characters, the whole rest of the story is meaningless.

(As an aside, I get the feeling someone on the dev team caught on to the issue I’m describing here, because the tea party memory sticks out like a sore thumb from the rest of the dragon tear cutscenes. It’s such a jarring change of pace to have the otherwise plot-heavy dragon’s tears come screeching to a halt for a scene where Sonia sits down with Zelda to have a cute little tea party and talk about absolutely nothing of significance that the whole thing almost seems like it was hastily tacked on to the story later. Given that the next (chronological) memory sees Sonia fall victim to an unceremonious death by chiropractor, it feels like someone realized that Sonia really doesn’t do or say much in the scenes before she dies and threw together the tea party scene so players would have at least one moment to look back on fondly when she’s fridged. But I digress)

The story told in the dragon’s tears is a highly linear one. But the open-ended nature of botw’s memory system remains, meaning that these tears can be found and viewed in any order. At first this doesn’t seem so bad, since the first two tears you’re likely to find if you follow the game’s intended path are also the chronological first and second of the memories you can discover through these geoglyph tears. But after those first two, the game kinda gives up on guiding you towards these tears in a way that flows well with the story they wrote: the closest tear geographically to the two the game initially guides you towards correlates to one of the penultimate scenes of that entire storyline, while the next scene chronologically is found almost halfway across the map. As such, it’s all but guaranteed that you’ll spoil yourself in some way without using either a guide or the (somewhat unintuitive and never fully explained by the game) little map in the forgotten temple. Finding memories in order didn’t matter so much in botw because the scenes you could find still worked well as standalone scenes before you discovered every memory and pieced together the full picture, and the game is never trying to surprise me about the characters’ fates at the end of this storyline: hell the first memory you’re guided to shows the calamity striking. But in contrast, viewing a dragon’s tear at the wrong time can completely ruin the story they’re trying to tell in those cutscenes. During my playthrough, for example, the first tear I found after the game stopped guiding me to them showed Ganondorf removing Sonia’s stone from her dead body. At this point I had known Sonia existed for all of like an hour, so every subsequent appearance she made was ruined for me by the fact that I already knew she was nothing but cannon fodder to be killed off for the sake of another character’s pain (Rauru and Zelda a-fucking-gain). I expected to be pissed that it was so easy to spoil myself, or maybe sad in passing that a character with her potential was so underutilized, but instead I just felt… tired. I wasn’t even halfway to the first settlement and already I was completely numb to the story the game was trying to tell.

But the worst was yet to come. And oh boy was it ever a low point for storytelling in the Zelda series. Remember how I said up above that the memories in botw had no connection to the story in the present? Let’s just say the same cannot be said for the dragon’s tears.

It’s May 2023. I’ve just finished the sage of wind questline. I still have hope that the story the game is trying to tell will be good. Deciding that I’ll go to Goron city next, I head towards the Thyplo skyview tower to expand my map, catch a glimpse of a nearby geoglyph from the air, and glide over to check it out. This geoglyph shows me a memory that not only recaps the entire dragon tear storyline, but also ends on a bit of foreshadowing about Zelda’s fate that’s about as subtle as a brick to the fucking face. By exploring -the thing the game claims it prioritized above all else in the design of its world and quests- I’d once again been hit with spoilers for a major story detail.

My main objective in this game is to find Zelda. It’s the only driving factor behind my journey towards all these different regions. The current big mystery I’m supposed to solve is why Zelda’s causing so much hell for the people of Hyrule. I now knew exactly where she was and what the deal with her appearances in other parts of Hyrule was, and I’d found it completely by accident by doing something the game says over and over again that it wants me to do. Unlike with Sonia’s death, this time I was a mess of emotions. I was pissed the fuck off that this open-world game had punished me twice already for trying to explore. More than that, I was disappointed that a game I had been so excited to play, from a series I had so many fond memories of, had let me down like this. With every subsequent quest where the sages and I chased a Zelda I knew was fake to our next objective, and every NPC wondering where she was that I couldn’t tell the truth to, that disappointment grew. The entire rest of the main story was ruined for me before I had progressed past 1/4th of the regional quests and a third of the dragon’s tears. There was no more sense of anticipation or mystery. I finished the rest of the game with a bitter taste in my mouth and haven’t touched it again since.

Do I think this story could have been good? Honestly, I don’t know, and by now I don’t really care either (that’s a lie. I care so so much and that’s probably why I hate totk as much as I do). But it’s all irrelevant, because like Cinderella’s stepsister cutting off her own heel so she can cram her foot into a glass slipper that’s never going to fit, totk is sabotaged by the devs’ insistence that everything fit itself into a world they custom-made for botw. This isn’t a new formula that the series is following, it’s Nintendo slapping a new coat of paint on an existing skeleton, and I’m not optimistic to see what this particular approach has in store for the Zelda series. Especially not at the price they’re charging for it.

#bluebird.txt #salt of the kingdom #totk critical #long post #totk salt #totk spoilers #apologies to my followers for the long-ass whatever this is #I do think about things that aren’t how much I hate this game I’m just in a mood lmao #negative #it’s fine if you disagree I just had to put my thoughts in words

[ezdotjpg]

also any game following botw that goes actually we need to reinstate the monarchy as it was again we just need to do it better this time has also failed its themes completely. like even if that was always intended to be the follow up it’s still antithetical to the game botw turned out to be

#one of the worst things abt totk to me is how it makes me dislike botw in retrospect #or like. Rethink everything I thought that game was trying to say #like was I bamboozled #was I reading what I wanted to read? #i don’t exactly think so #textdotjpg #totk salt

[arkon-z]

If you played Age of Calamity and sneered at it for daring to interpret the story of Breath of the Wild a little differently and then went on to play Tears of the Kingdom, you owe Age of Calamity an apology.

#BOTW again #but everything Sheikah is Zonai now. #totk salt #AOC had SO much respect for BOTW that it included details that most people would have ignored #meanwhile TOTK just went #the devs explanation of the disappearance of the Sheikah tech boiled down to 'a wizard did it'

[smilesrobotlover]

Hi, I’m back to ranting about totk.

I really hate the idea of this specific Zelda being a playable character, but the story and game would’ve been infinitely better if it was from her perspective. The calamity happened to both Zelda and Link, Link had some connection to the champions, he experienced the tragedy, so you felt that as well as a player. But with the imprisoning war, it wasn’t as good as the calamity. Sure the tears were there to show what happened, but except when the light dragon happened, it was hard to care about anything. I didn’t care when Mineru died, I didn’t care that Rauru sealed himself and Ganondorf away (tho that was an awesome scene), and even tho she was an interesting character, I didn’t care about Sonia. The ancient sages were blank slates and didn’t even feel like the real people, so everything just fell flat. But from Zelda’s perspective, she KNEW these people. She cared about Rauru, she cared about Sonia. She clearly worked with Mineru a lot, and I’d imagine that they’d have a lot in common with their love for machinery and stuff. She worked with the sages and clearly cared about their loyalty to Rauru. This was a new Hyrule which could’ve had a new map, new monsters, and new characters. And they could’ve had time to develop the sages, Rauru, Mineru, and Sonia where we actually cared about them. Idk how’d they do this with the world of totk from Link’s perspective, maybe once you get a tear, you actually play as Zelda and see things in more detail? Or Link is actually there with Zelda and she sends him back in the end with her time power, but can’t send herself because I imagine it’d be hard to do that on purpose, and then she turned into a dragon? Idk, but either way, the story would’ve been far more impactful with the characters being interesting if Zelda WAS playable. And I hate saying that but I can’t deny it. The story they went for, it would’ve been better.

#smiles rambles #totk #totk spoilers #totk salt #tears of the kingdom #tears of the kingdom spoilers #idk I found the surface itself pretty boring #like I already explored this #and yeah there are caves but they’re all the same #this game suffers from too much repetition in my opinion #again. idk how they’d do it #but the imprisoning war was lame #but from Zelda’s perspective it wouldn’t have been you know?

[eggman-1]

Every NPC talking about pirates in Lurien village and stuff got my hopes up abt actual pirates. but of course it was just bokoblins

#i swear this game is allergic to interesting enemy design #totk neg #totk salt #like. Unique pirates. MM had them. OOS had them. Hell even SS had them a bit. SO DID ST AND PH #anything other than a bokoblin or lizalfos. #i miss the enemy variety of older games #deku babas. Deku scrubs. ACTUAL stalfos. Skulltullas. Bubbles. gibdos that aren't just redeads. Evil floor tiles. #Wolfos. POES. Freezards. Wall masters. Floor masters. Beamos. Armos. Dodongos. Tektites. Stalchildren. Fire slugs. Iron knuckles. #Gohma larve. Shell blades. Those fuckin spike things. Anubis. Octorock. Keese. If you wanna count the gerudo we can do that too #That's just oot. That's JUST OOT #here's the list of every enemy in totk: #Bokoblin. Moblin. Lizalfos. Gibdo. Lynel. Gloom hand. Frox. Soldier constructs. Arocuda. Likelike. horrorblin. Evermean. Keese. Octorock #that's it. i'm not counting bosses or mini bosses because oot would be longer #this may be its own post later

[snail-studios]

#huehuehue i think im funny #totk #totk spoilers #zelda #stoopid dragon >:/ #totk salt #loz #snailsstuff

[gensnix]

I will be forever mad that the master sword breaks in totk. You had all the right elements and you ruined it.

If you wanted to keep the breaking mechanic for it you could have just said that the malice (gloom) in Link would cause him to need to take breaks from using the sword

#how hard is it to change some text #you turned zelda into a noodle version of the pedestal in the forest for what #a shittier version of the master sword in botw #zelda #loz #botw #totk #totk salt #legend of zelda #tear of the kingdom

[mememan93]

Im sorry but i can't stand totks new lore. I do not like the zonai. Rauru and Mineru's designs are cool, but also. I'm sorry i hate their addition to the lore of the series.

#"nobody plays zelda for the plot or lore'' MAYBE I DO HUH?? #totk spoilers #totk #i mean they had a chance to be something cool but it was really 'ooh ancient society super advanced' again #like the robots in Sws. as much as i loved them they were the first of a bunch of that trope and i despise it #give me back my fantasy and magic and triforce in my fantasy game #and and then idea that rauru and sonia actually founded hyrule and that zelda gets her light powers from her zonai heritage? give me a brea #raven the gamer #tears of the kingdom spoilers #totk salt #i guess #y'all can't say i didn't tag it

[only-by-the-stars]

TotK is so frustrating because there are genuinely several things I would love to incorporate into fics (mostly items, but also some NPCs and a handful of concepts and little areas), but Unfortunately the Plot. if it was just mediocre, that'd be one thing, but it's so disconnected from BOTW and so disjointed from itself that I'm at a loss for how I'd even begin to salvage it without doing something else that barely resembles it. at that point I might as well come up with my own plot, you know?

what I'm gonna end up doing is just... taking all those little scraps and working them into various AUs. like the Adventure Time one, for instance. that one's the most ripe, I think, for a lot of this.

hmm. gonna make a list, I think, under a cut.

first of all, let's not lie to ourselves: 'secret passageway under the castle that contains long-concealed/sealed Horrors' is a banger of a concept. unfortunately. unfortunately this was not executed as well as it could've been. I would love to do something neat with this sometime. I think it would fit especially well in the AT AU as stated. perhaps even with a take on those nuclear warnings.

Penn was a genuinely entertaining new NPC and I enjoyed the Lucky Clover Gazette chain of sidequests for the most part. like, could've done without the stuff setting up Zelda as being omni-talented and so super special (it really flattens her character, you know? such amateurish writing), but the concept of investigating rumors for a newspaper was fun. also the All-Clucking Cucco one was hilarious.

the Stable Trotters were so charming! I really liked this sidequest chain too.

the Stormwind Ark was actually kinda cool too, gave me Skies of Arcadia vibes. I wonder if I could do anything with it...

I want to stress, before I go any further, that if you've read or are planning to read my fic Song of a Champion... Yunobo using the Boulder Breaker and Riju using scimitars are things I had planned before the trailer revealing this was a thing in TotK. it is yet another entertaining instance of me predicting/guessing things correctly. xD

if I ever do anything with a version of the Depths, they're gonna have more, well, depth. they should've had settlements, or at least the ruins of them, or... something, you know? love the concept, meh on the execution. :/

same with the sky islands. and the explanation for the Great Sky Island in that one sidequest there was... really not satisfying, sadly. deffo something I could toy with and improve on.

Hyrulean pizza. 'nuff said. I applaud wholeheartedly the decision to give us cheese and tomatoes and let us make one of the greatest culinary creations known to mankind.

I'm iffy on the mushroom fashion/additions to Hateno, but I like the idea of Cece opening a shop in Hateno and selling some of those new outfits I like. I especially liked the sets based on the three dragons, this would be a neat way to get them on Link in that SoaC follow-up I wanna do. especially because Mipha NEEDS to see him in the slutty ones

if I ever do a version of the episode Wizards Only, Fools for the AT AU, the Depths outfit would make a neat disguise to get Link in.

obviously I plan to have AT Link lose his arm. obviously.

the wells and caves were pretty fun. though I do wish there'd been something genuinely creepy at the bottom of at least one well...

the Desert Rift is something that I would love to put into the desert area in the AT AU, it has tons of potential. I definitely have Ideas.

I really want to have Mipha and Link go to the salt spa in Lurelin as a couples' thing. it's a small thing, but I think it'd be cute.

I do actually enjoy weapon fusion and I think those magic rods/staves in particular would be a neat addition to some AUs.

almost every enemy was a great addition to the roster (I say almost because THOSE ARE NOT PROPER GIBDOS I AM STILL MAD ABOUT THIS). hopefully the next game will have even more things to fight (I especially want ReDeads and ACTUAL Poes back).

speaking of Poes, I just. sigh. so many interesting things that could've been done there, that just... weren't. at bare minimum, if they were adamant about making them a form of currency, it would've been more fun to bring back the Poe Collector than have those statues. I want to work him into the AT AU (and I have ideas that kinda meld how Poes worked in past games with this one, I just need to sit and nail them down).

back on foodstuffs, I liked all the new ingredients. I already worked golden apples into Under a Strange Moon, and I'd love to find uses for the elemental fruits somewhere too. stambulbs and sundelions are neat too, as are the new pumpkin, the oil, and the mushroom and fish that make you glow.

on the less edible side, puffshrooms and especially muddle buds were a LOT of fun to play with.

on the "dubiously edible" side (because you can turn these into elixirs but not straight up FOOD), I really like the design of the deep fireflies. the sticky frogs and lizards were also really handy!

brightbloom seeds/flowers could be neat to use too...

that's all I can think of for now, but I'm sure I'm forgetting something

#loz #totk salt #it's not all negativity though? #like there are things i genuinely like and want to work with #it's just... the Other Stuff. you know. #but finding potential in otherwise not so great things is kinda my brand

[waywardsalt]

small little thing abt botw/totk and the future of zelda games considering it seems likely that future zelda games might be in the same style as those two and how i feel like botw/totk don't actually feel like zelda games (kind of messy i just typed this out in a kind of informal or whatever way) (this post is long af btw so uhhhh yeah)

im part of the group that claims that botw/totk aren't 'real' zelda games but... i guess they are technically 'real' zelda games, but... they sure as fuck don't feel like it, and because of that, i'm not at all excited with the idea of future loz games being in the same style, especially with the pitfalls these last two games have fallen into having been things that past zelda games did especially well, it feels like things have been sort of flipped on their heads in terms of what's being valued or whatever

like... the best parts of older zelda games were things like the story and the characters and the puzzles and the dungeons and stuff like that... the best parts of botw/totk right now are just the gameplay. people enjoy these new characters, but they dont have the narrative backing that older games do, they don't have the same impactful arcs or roles allowed by a more linear story

the point i want to get at though is how botw/totk honestly don't feel like direct evolutions or steps up from past zelda games but rather just... entirely different game styles (open world games) with the zelda flavoring and worldbuilding and story styling slapped on top.

i mean... i feel like a half-decent example of some other well-known franchises that have jumped on this (honestly kind of thoughtless) open-world bandwagon are mario (mario odyssey) pokemon (sword/shield and scarlet/violet) fire emblem (kind of. with some free-walking segments in 3 houses and engage) and the soulsborne type games (elden ring), these are all other well known and storied game series' that have somewhat made the move to open world, and i think that switch was a bit smoother, kept the core and integrity of the games that came before much better than botw/totk did

elden ring is the easiest to explain- the gameplay loop and core mechanics are the same and build upon past games' you just have more room to run around and get killed in with some little open-world flourishes like material gathering.

fire emblem is... a bit less flexible in terms of changing up the core gameplay, and the addition of open-world segments are added to add bonuses to the strategy gameplay and allow for more support-building oppourtunities and little minigames, and its more or less evolution from echoes' dungeon-crawling bits and the customizable castle in fates. the core gameplay still effectively works the exact same, just with some little class or mechanic tweaks and additions.

mario odyssey, though each world was pretty massive, still had your typical 3d mario platforming, and the new hat stuff fit in pretty well with olderpowerups and gimmicks, and the boss battles feel and work pretty similarly to the way they used it- odyssey does feel like an evolution from past mario games (ps. playing two-player with one person as cappy snaps the game in half. its the secret easy mode lol)

the new pokemon games are pretty much just the same as past pokemon games, theyre just open world and buggy as fuck rip have extra little open-world flourishes that build on what past games set up. the battling works the same as ever and the progression is the same with a number of powerful trainers you have to battle to continue forward.

with botw/totk... the progression is dramatically different in terms of power-scaling, world presentation, item-gathering, puzzle-solving... pretty much everything in the established zelda format. i get that it was pretty much the aim with botw to have a fresh start and throw out a lot of the old standards but it just makes them feel so dramatically alien to past zelda games; theyre completely different experiences in pretty much every single way, and as such they dont feel like what we've (well, people who have started with and spent a lot of time with other loz games) learned to associate with the zelda titles.

with open world games in general it's a bit harder to have a truly impactful narrative akin to those in past zelda games, anyways. i will admit that botw was a good execution of trying out something entirely new, and the narrative and gameplay and world actually complement each other very well, so despite what i've said in the past I can't really fault it's narrative too much since it's a less traditional sort of narrative and effectively does what it aims to do very well.

totk, on the other hand, proves that this style of game does not mesh with the old style of storytelling at ALL. linear games can have proper narratives with coherent stakes, developing characters, twists and reveals and building emotion and mood- and all of that is thrown out the window with totk when they decided to try and have both a more linear story with actual reveals and development and emotion, while also letting you literally spoil it for yourself out the gate.

you can't really have a well-executed story when players are capable of doing things drastically out of order and of jumping into story beats without the prior buildup and straight-up ruining what could be otherwise emotional reveals, and players being capable of doing this is hard-baked in how the game fundamentally works. I honestly feel bad for people who found the fifth sage by accident before anything else.

you can't effectively have a linear story with character growth and plot developments and impactful moments while also allowing it to be experienced out of order and with massive time gaps in between; with this kind of stuff, you can't really have your cake and eat it too. say what you will about the linearity of past zelda games, but i bet you that midna wouldn't be as beloved as a character as she is if it weren't for the linear order of the story and its events. certain parts of storytelling may demand for a linear manner of telling that story.

botw's story works because none of the memories reveal anything groundbreaking taht you don't already know; they are optional and merely give you more information about these characters from link's past and simply inform you about the girl keeping ganon at bay. if you find a late memory first, that's fine- it technically doesnt reveal anything too important to you, it just fills in some gaps for you and your player character. it makes sense within the story itself for the world to be so open and for you to be able to do what you can; the story is not the focus, nor is it even needed to beat the game. the story was made with the gameplay and what you are allowed to do in mind, and as such doesn't include things such as in-depth character development or important plot-twists.

on the other hand, you can easily spoil totk's biggest plot twist in a handful of different ways completely by accident, just by getting curious about the world around you. this can shatter a lot of the mystery or tension in the plot and this can happen completely by accident to someone playing the game organically and blindly. the story itself doesn't take this into account, it reads more like a linear story that would be more suited to a linear style of play, coming across things in order to ramp up the stakes and let things be revealed at the best possible time. (tbh totk's story doesnt seem to take the player into account in general, if the game forcing you to watch basically the same long cutscene four fucking times says anything, jesus christ)

narrative pitfalls aside, botw/totk put heavy emphasis on gameplay, but not in the same way older zelda games did, and as such trade away the unique items and gimmick-y game-specific mechanics for a small toolset handed to you out the gate. what botw/totk do- giving you everything you need from the start and having very little true varation in the gameplay from then on out- make sense and works just fine for an open world game. there is, however, a lack of actual depth to that gameplay that other open world games do have (off the top of my head, the ability to unlock and upgrade abilities and have general character upgrades in fenyx rising as well as the impressive depths of elden ring's combat and character customization system). the most depth botw/totk has to the actual gameplay is just the fourish different weapon types and the ways you use your fourish abilities (saying fourish bc for real ultrahand and fuse are fundamentally the exact same thing). there is also just raising the little defense numbers on your armor and getting more stamina and health, but that does absolutely nothing to the actual gameplay but make link more durable.

i mean, sure, health in past loz games just makes link more durable, too, but thats how health upgrades in any other game work.

the gameplay switch makes sense, considering the switch from a linear puzzle-adventure concentric game to a more sandbox-esque open-world game, but it does not mesh with the former loz formula at all, so while the shift in style makes sense, it makes me think that you can't have a previous-style loz experience in an open-world sandboxish sort of game. especially with how in totk you can very easily bypass most of the fire temple just using the mechanics handed to you at the start. you can't have the same type of zelda dungeons in a game where you are allowed to do it 'wrong' and the game itself does not allow for the same kinds of puzzles.

i am of the opinion that so long as future zelda games work the same way botw/totk did, we will not get old-school zelda-style dungeons again.

the loss of a variety of items used for specific puzzles and environment switches is the loss of a varied dungeon experience and the loss of the same kind of world and character progression as past zelda games.

you are handed everything you'll ever need at the start of botw/totk. the only thing that will meaningfully change is how much damage you do. there are no alternate strategies opened up by new items that can double as weapons, no new traversal options or routes opened up by things such as grappling hooks or clawshots or whips or specific wands. even the battle system is drastically different, instead of being enemies that take specific amounts of hits to die while you can obtain progressively stronger swords, enemies are just damage sponges and you can get all kind of weapons that just do different numerical amounts of damage.

the bosses themselves- big staples and draws of zelda games- also work extremely differently. instead of having to leverage specific items to expose weak spots or having to fight in a specific manner to do damage, you are just asked to... do damage. even in totk's bosses, where sage abilities are most certainly helpful, the only boss i found to truly require a sage ability was the lighting temple's boss; the others i either hardly used the sage at all (i didn't use yunobo at all in the second phase of the fire temple boss and hardly had a need for tulin with the wind temple boss [esp considering i was using a 3-shot lynel bow to make the poor fucker a cakewalk]) or found that alternative solutions felt better, like resorting to splash fruit on repeat water temple fights instead of wrestling with having to activate and use sidon's ability. the sages are honestly fairly poor replacements for dungeon specific items.

this kind of causes botw/totk to play more like a poor man's dark souls or just like any other open world rpgish game. i don't play botw/totk for the experience of a zelda game, i play it because it's an open world game that i can walk around in for five minute before switching to something else because i liked something in that other game better.

the combat in botw/totk isnt designed in such a way that makes it feel good. mineru's mech is fucking dismal, but since it's just either shooting with a bow or attacking with one of three types of melee weapon with some timing for a dodge, it can get stale fast. it doesn't necessarily even feel good, since there's not enough variety for it to get really engaging. (this is def an uneven comparison, but elden ring's combat feels considerable better with the different dodges you can do and the amount of attack options you have with just one weapon, not to mention the amount of control you have over your general fighting style.) combat in botw/totk at hour 1 is the exact same as combat in botw/totk at hour 100, the only different being the amount of damage you do or how much of a beating you can take.

it just... the styles of botw/totk can't allow them to feel the same as older zelda games. the shift in style was clearly a good move to draw in series newbies and shake things up, but it comes at the caveat of making them feel distant from their predecessors and uncomfortably similar to other games like them. it's hard to avoid comparisons with elden ring when on the surface they are very similar games, one just feels more true to its core identity

this all is said without mentioning the way in which botw/totk lore feels almost dismissive of past series staples and seems intent on not looking back while also taking every fucking attempt to nudge you and say 'hey, remember that zelda game' and honestly all that shit does is make me want to play a different zelda game.

botw/totk seem altogether very desperate to distance themselves from past zelda games while also being unable to really tear itself from what came before and it just culminates in me spotting linebeck island on the map and going 'damn i miss linebeck' and turning the fucking game off to play phantom hourglass instead. say what you will about phantom hourglass, but it certainly handles its story progression and character development infinitely better than the game that lets you accidentally shatter the impact of the story by deciding to check out that cool temple in the distance of the depths

#quick note abt the examples from early on i got the verdict on soulsborne games from my friend who has actually played more than elden ring #and pokemon was kinda a guess the most recently mainline pokemon game i have is sun/moon #totk has made me really think about what i like in video games and why lmao. #it has also made me appreciate botw a lot more. i prefer the emptier hyrule of botw it just feels extra cluttered in totk #i like how in botw its a lot more natural and more fun to honestly run around in with there being no falling debris or scary holes #salty talks #totk salt #being annoying abt totk again hiiiii. id like to talk abt stuff i liked in other loz games but its hard to start without some kind prompt #im not entirely sure how i could really explain how i feel totk's story failed and why without going in circles for a while #its just. the gameplay and the intended story experience clash like fucking crazy plus the story relies too much on the player #to do a lot of emotional heavy lifting #like. if you want to start a convo with me abt this go for it but this is what i have to say for rn #loz #legend of zelda #totk #botw #totk criticism #i do really appreciate botw now im not gonna lie. its still not amazing in my eyes but i appreciate it for what it is #also i cannot believe totk made linebeck island worse fuck you #like. in botw theres a goddamn chest with 50 rupees and thats a good subtle nod to what's being referenced #in totk theres just two bokoblins and nothing else and i dont care if it wouldve been lazy to just have the chest there again #you explicitly namedropped linebeck might as well make good on it. its more fun to continue having little nods like that #i understand when people say that saying botw isnt a 'real zelda game' is bad criticism but tbh its not really a criticism its just an #observation. it comes with its ups and downs and for me it makes me enjoy these games less and makes me feel a bit alienated #if that makes sense. idk. its late and if i continue with that thought im going to lose it for sure #ig just. im upset abt how totk handled its story and im upset at the idea of... this being the future of these games yknow #it feels like a selfish sentiment but idk #long post #bitching abt totk

[minnowtank]

God I fucking hate Sidon the Zora so fucking much holy shit. Holy shit, every frame he's in, every cutscene, every gif, every jpeg, he's got this painfully vacant, stupid as shit, fuckass look on his stupid shark face. Absolutely no part of his ugly as sin piece of shit character design is endearing. His stupid fucking leg fin skirt? Who the hell makes a fish guy with leg fins like that. His dumb flaily fucking twig arms? His shitty, lumpy bastard hammerhead-head? The three thousand percent unnecessary dumbass shitass fucking PINK “NOSE” that no anthropomorphic fish has EVER FUCKING HAD IN tHE HISTORY OF GOD'S GREEN FUCKING EARTH? God, I hate him. I hate him so much. So FUCKING much. Every time I see a stuffed toy Sidon or a Sidon gif or a shitty goddamn TikTok edit, it ignites my primal rage response and I'm overcome by the need to punt this shitty little homunculus into the fucking sun. "Bhurr blur, I'm Sidon the fuckshit fish fucker, I love my empty no-homo void of a wife". Fuck you. Fuck you fuck you fuck you fuck you fuck you. You look like Bruce from Finding Nemo summoned a patronus. Your dumb fucking fishtail hair makes your whole shitty head look like an anvil with a tumour. I hate your dumb fucking nonexistent pink nose and your stupid, half-hidden eyes and your over-the-top goofy ass upbeat asshole personality. Any scene he's sad it invokes all the wrath and fury of a spoiled child having a meltdown over a chocolate bar in a w*lmart checkout line. And I know its irrational. That's the worst part. I know he's just a shitty fucking side character in a stupid fucking children's video game, I know it doesn't matter, I know I shouldn't care. But that's part of the problem. The part where no matter the might and fury of my hatred, the locus of my homicidal intent is altogether inconsequential. I find myself laying awake in the dark in the early hours of the morning consumed by the spirit of Wrath itself, all the force and might of a flaming hurricane directed at a bottle of piss in a ditch by the highway. The absurdity of it all burns me to my core. What better things could this energy be directed towards? And yet my disdain for this stupid, useless, insubstantial failure of sexy character design utterly eclipses the intrigue of all other pursuits. I hate him. I hate him on a level of my mind reserved for the worst of the world's array of sinners, and I can't even begin to justify it. Shitstick the shark dick is, for all intents and purposes, the animated corpse of all of humanity's saccharine pretenses- every condescending, passive-aggressive statement of meaningless fuckable video game side character fandom wank distilled into a single, hateable form. The fucking. Fuck. I have no words. There is no cuss or epithet in any language that can encapsulate the height of the emotions I am experiencing. God, I hate him so much. I hate him so, so fucking much. I want to light his ugly dumpster body on fire. I want to graphically beat him to death with his own stupid fucking tail head. I want to punch him to death. You know that weird feeling you get, when you see a picture of something so cute you find yourself overcome with the bizarre, inexplicable urge to squeeze it? It's EXACTLY like that, except instead of cuteness it's disgust. The wordless knowledge that his existence as a fictional work is evidence of all the failures of mankind. I find myself possessed by the will of a Holy Angel gone rogue with the belief that God has made a mistake, and I alone must correct it. This is the trial by which Samael himself fell from grace. This wild, meaningless rage. A thousand blades of shining steel cast with inhuman force in the direction of a plastic grocery bag floating on a breeze. What horrors must I have committed in a past life to be plagued by this torment now? I must Unmake this fictional fish.

#copypasta #🐟 #totk #botw #loz #LMAO sorry for tagging #totk salt #totk critical

[smilesrobotlover]

The eighth heroine of the Gerudo being a Hylian man doesn’t sit right with me

#smiles rambles #like someone pointed out how in totk #the Gerudo are always needing help from the Hylians #and like #yeah #It’s weird #the things with botw didn’t bother me as much as it did others #but this seriously rubs me the wrong #way #you’d think the strong tribe of Gerudo women would be capable enough to understand the desert #and would be able to figure how to fight on their own #and don’t need Link or Zelda or that guy to tell them what to do #I don’t like this say this but this does feel a little misogynistic #totk salt #tears of the kingdom #tears of the kingdom spoilers #totk spoilers #totk

[eggman-1]

What was the point of the emphasis on the sky in advertising, if it was gonna be super fucking empty? The depths are slightly better, but not by much, and the normal overworld is still full of nothing but enemy camps and koroks.

#totk neg #totk salt #the sky is empty. the depths are dark. the overworld is the same bullshit #like i'm sorry it's been alleged years since the end of botw and there's nothing new?? #there's no new towns. no attempts at rebuilding the ruins? #fine i get it. upheaval broke things. but nothing???

[snail-studios]

Kind of sad how Zelda is pretty much useless in TotK.

She doesn't seal away ganon, Link does, and she spends her time healing a sword that isn't even necessary for the final battle. She didn't even need to do that; The Deku Tree could have kept it safe for her while she tried to get back to her own time!

I mean... The only thing she does that is remotely helpful is build one school (which is awesome of her.) but I wish she did more than stand around and gasp in the main plot :/

#loz #zelda #snailsstuff #totk salt #rant #anyway my thoughts #Zelda sucks in this game #ranting

[gensnix]

me trying to figure out how Zelda transported herself waaaay past 10,000 years into the past when all Sonia can do is rewind shit

#you got your light powers from rauru and time powers from me owo #no the fuck she didn't #stop lying #totk is just fanfiction zelda made when she was trapped with ganon for 100 years #he then bullied her for it #the more I think about this game the more my brain itches #and not in a good way #zelda #the legend of zelda #totk #totk critical #totk salt #tears of the kingdom #snix talks

[toronbo]

watching totk collect consecutive Ls is so satisfying lmfao

#totk salt #i dont even care what wins as long as that loses <333 very happy for bg though #using that one tag for people that are blacklisting things bc its the most common one i see