Early observations:

The Sheikah towers are still there and there's... light coming from beneath them?

Hey those lizalfos sound like they're mining underground. That's a giant place, wow.

He has a voice!!! Little less menacing out of context, but that "no survivors" bit was good.

GREEN SPIRAL IN HATENO?

Ohhh, that's why the monsters are different

CAVE HINOX BATTLE???

AUTOMATON??

Damn that's a lot of flying. We can make it up to Vah Medoh six ways to Sunday (suck it, Revali)

That sure looks like the character from the last trailer with the fox-ish face, but way more human. Also clearly it takes a while to get that green arm.

"I'm not sure you can stop him" juxtaposed against the jump off the sky island.

Also there's a lot of those and one of them's a circle? This is new and interesting.

The creepy music's back!

Actually, does Yona even.... have a place she comes from? At all? She mentioned recently coming to the Zora domain I know, but like...she doesn’t say from where, right? Did they seriously slap her in as a ‘not gay!!!!’ wife SO fast that they didn’t even have time to make up a kingdom name? 

Actually. There aren’t even multiple Zora domains at all, are there. Did they bother even retconning things to say ‘yes there are now ok’ at least??? Or is homegirl SERIOUSLY standing there hailing from the far-off land of ‘the writers room when people are worried about homophobic fanboy backlash’??

It's... something only I can do

~~~

become your destiny, kill your identity, sacrifice who you are to become who you must be to save the world.

That's Zelda Babey!!! They do it every time but they did it MORE this time. Love to see it. I hope there's a satisfying catharsis at the end!! I was so excited for the themes of this one. The logo is basically a dragon eating its own tail. hows THAT for themes of cycles of destiny that you can't escape?

My Nintendo Direct Impressions

Pretty freaking fantastic!

still aghast at how critical role was able to do a totk oneshot sponsored by famously-protective-of-their-ips nintendo, but i'm very glad they did because babson is awesome and i love her very much

| Drops this and leaves

FUCK YOU-

//cough

An Age of Calamity AU where everything is the same but also not-

Sooga overthrows Kohga's title as leader and becomes a corrupted PoS then kills the King and is now trying to fight Zelda for Hyrule's throne

Kohga is now his timid slutty lil assistant who just wants his "old Soogy back"

.....

And may have been the reason why Sooga ended up like this...

Hint hint it's a soul binding, corrupted mask he accidentally made for him

.......

.......

.......

Also may need their counterparts from the official AoC timeline to correct their bs and to re-teach them the lesson of their love for each other

Anyways

. Art © Me . DON’T RE-POST .

The fact that people think Zelda stole Link’s house in TOTK… they’re literally married??

Okay, but, also, @ganymedesclock said that Ganondorf’s new sword looks kind of like the same size/shape as the swords that Sooga used, as well as the general size and weight of the Windblade cleavers even if it’s not the exact same design. So that begs the question: are the Yiga Blademasters emulating Ganondorf, or is Ganondorf himself emulating a more ancient Sheikah swordfighting style that predates the Yiga Clan?

Happy one month until tears of the kingdom 🎉

WAUGH YOU’RE RIGHT

so. i’ve admittedly hit a wall on revising stuff for totk and whatnot at the moment. redesign stuff for botw verse isn’t super drastic either, if anything it’s become updating her appearance to align more with my Fade hc at this point. i’ve grown very attached to her magic arm too and i’m leaning towards keeping it that way. but instead of it being linked to totk stuff she’ll have lost it as a means of other sacrifice -- probably due to teleporting around too much or during some attempt to link the realms again. consequences meeting her foolhardy actions and all that jazz.

i’ve also decided to keep the original botw verse i cooked up as an au. of an au. LMAO.

i’m not sure anyone would want to fiddle around with the idea of the totk hand having been Midna’s post sequel release but. idk. i still love it. and esp given, uhm. certain things that totk changed in terms of storyline i believe it fits more into timing of. stuff.

for now though unless specified i’ll have Midna’s botw au presence (and arm) have a much less defined origin. apologies for lack of actual rp posts and just rambling a lot instead. i’ll hopefully have stuff ironed out more within the coming week, though i’d like to jump back into writing before that!

when people talk about how fiction affects reality, theyre talking about me.

OHMYGODOHMYGODOHMYGOD

ooooogh my little treats came in the mail and like. suddenly waking up at 4:25 every morning is worth it. oh also i passed 100 hours in tears of the kingdom today i love my little game

it’s funny how yesterday, when i made the decision to stay home from work, i spent the entire day beating myself up for not going to work

meanwhile today, when it gets closer to the time for me to go to work, i get super anxious and start mildly panicking

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.