The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom

[Moonface]

@queenzelda: Those are the same two main story locations I've done too, and I'd say my biggest gripe I had after doing the fire temple is that the cutscene when you get the tear is the same one each time but just swapping out the character. I'll likely skip the cutscene for any other tears that are clearly going to use that same cutscene too because I'm not wasting my time watching the same thing 4+ times.

I'm really enjoying the game otherwise, despite still finding the depths have very little incentive to care about a very large amount of the area:

Spoiler

There's so much empty space that has nothing or just enemies that don't drop anything to be worth fighting compared to the easier enemies on the surface. The depths is basically just going in straight lines to each light tower and only deviating if you spot a Yiga hideout for the crafting books or an abandoned mine for the ore/chest. Maybe I've still just not explored enough but at 1/3 of the map covered down there I'm not holding out much hope.

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Oh my god I had to come and immediately edit this post to write about what I just encountered!
It's related to the gloom and an enemy, so if you don't think you've done something that meets those requirements I strongly recommend you do not read this:

Spoiler

I got ambushed by one of those gloom hand creatures, and decided I'd just fight it this time and see how it goes. I expected upon defeat that it would just simply disappear and drop some items, but instead a boss meter shows up and you get put into a fight on the spot against Phantom Ganondorf! This might be the biggest highlight of the entire game for me because I simply was not expecting it and got genuinely surprised.

[Moonface]

I just reached Gerudo Town and man, I really love what they've done to it in this game. So much so I almost don't want to help fix their problems just so it doesn't go back to normal.

[ShiraNoMai]

I haven't had many opportunities to put a real dent into this game yet but what I have seen has been real neat.

I've recently reached Kakariko Village after getting paraglider access and I was moments away from starting a bit of lore/story scenes before I put it down. I had trouble finding the village at first but I happened to know the general direction it was in enough to figure my way to it. Plus the lore-specific markers the game was hinting at to look out for made it way easier to find.

[Moonface]

Funnily enough I still have yet to make it to Kakariko, despite having done the Rito, Goron, and Gerudo quests now. I know the game tries to make a point at Lookout Landing of directing you to it, but the visual markers the game says indicate the village are just not very apparent to me. Even last night when I was playing and actively looking for the markers from the sky I had to have @ShiraNoMai confirm I was actually looking at Kakariko. I think I also ended up coming to Kakariko very late in my first run of BotW though so it seems I just never do good at finding that particular place up front. Once I did find it though in that game I could never stop stumbling into the place.

Since my last post I finished the Gerudo themed main quest, and it definitely felt like the hardest one when it came to the boss fight. It's the only boss I've died to and I died to it multiple times across multiple phases.


A word of advice too for anyone who has done the Rito main quest, be careful having Tulin summoned when exploring the Gerudo Desert. He has a habit of targeting the critical point on an enemy, and Electric Lizalfo's have their horn as the weak point and it being hit will result in their electricity being discharged and if you're close enough, Link will be affected by it. I've died a few times now to being caught in that discharge now due to an arrow unexpectedly hitting it.

Oh, and playing this game in handheld mode isn't a good idea really. Even though I had the Switch plugged in, this game was draining the battery faster than it could charge so I don't expect you'd get much life from the battery if you played in handheld without a charging cable plugged in.

[Moonface]

I fought the final boss of this game this morning, and overall it's a big improvement over BotW's final boss for the most part. Both games do suffer with the final phase of the final boss being a lot of spectacle and very little else though; this one does it better at least but I wish the final phase had felt as good to play as it did to look at it.

Overall, the game is leaps and bounds better than BotW but has enough shortcomings to it still to really not put it higher than like an 8. I hope the next instalment moves away from the open world format too, just because I think a more focused and linear approach would be really beneficial to the story telling and puzzle design. Puzzles in TotK are good but there's too many one and done ideas that comes from a lack of being able to build on those ideas because of the open approach to the world and the order you can do things in.

Also, far too many things to spend rupee's on in this game and far too few things to make money from. I've put over 200 hours into this game and I'm nowhere close to upgrading every armor piece because the rupee requirement is so high for all of them, and that's not even going into the resource requirements. Throw in Link's house and buying the compendium photos (because fuck taking them all manually with how many the game wants) and the game must want a few hundred thousand rupees to obtain everything. Trouble is, resources worth a lot of money are also used to upgrade armor, so you can't sell that to get the money you need because then you lack the resources.