#i liked the puzzles and dungeons it was fun to play through even though it took me years to finish
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thoughts on totk now that i’ve beaten it
under the cut bc of length and bc there is honestly a fair bit of negative stuff
i don’t really think i can say that i liked totk.
it’s fine, it’s genuinely fucking incredible from a technical standpoint with ultrahand, recall, the three map layers and with how smoothly it ran for me. as a game it’s fine.
i’ll start with the things i dislike and end with what i actually liked
i honestly didn’t really like ultrahand? i disliked how much the game leaned on it, since so many puzzles and whatever just boiled down to ‘make something that’ll work’ and it just... it was far too clunky for me to really enjoy using it, outside of using some of the same few designs for traversal. there were a few times when i could see what the game wanted me to do with ultrahand and the given zonai parts and sometimes it just... didn’t work at all. more often than not ultrahand was frustrating for me to use so the game’s reliance on it just made it into a chore sometimes.
in a similar vein the dungeons were serious letdowns. i mean, don’t get me wrong, they’re fine, they had good themes and (mostly) had good aesthetics and general looks and identities to them, but the fact that they were just... basically twenty-ish minute little things was kind of disappointing. i hate that they all had the exact same ‘go hit x number of switches’ gimmick. it really limited what you could do and fucked with the dungeon design, too. the only one where that really worked for me was the fire temple, which was my favorite overall. the water temple was especially dismal, with the least inspired look and just being an astoundingly easy experience. the puzzles in those dungeons were so awfully easy, too, especially since half of the time they just hand you what you need so you barely need to really assess the situation and put a plan together
i hated the water dungeon’s little mini-areas where you do a single piss-easy puzzle to automatically get your prize, i hated the wind temple’s god damn ‘pull a lever and get your prize’ kind of puzzles, i hated how soul-crushingly disappointed i felt when i took a look at the lightning temple’s map and realized that every fucking floor had a singular room just for the switch puzzle. god forbid it’s as fun as the lowest level of that temple. i really miss stuff like mini-bosses or rooms where you have to do a puzzle in order to just... progress, i miss dungeons that i could get lost in or spend a while in or just had... something more interesting or some more substance so that i can’t just breeze through like it’s a glorified shrine. most of the puzzles in those dungeons were simpler than some shrines i did.
i didn’t care to do much exploration since there honestly isn’t much motivation to explore the surface map if you’ve already played botw, and the scarcity of materials this time really got to me, it took me a while to have a half-decent stock of materials, and i still had trouble not running out of stuff even though i was using amiibos to stock up on some things. the money situation was rough, too... a lot of things are cheaper to sell, but some armor is still really expensive plus you have to pay the great fairies to upgrade your equipment in addition to having the correct materials. that especially felt odd- having to grab a handful of (goddamn hard to get) lynel guts is hard enough to upgrade the soldier’s armor, but you want me to cough up 500 rupees, too??
(the scarcity of monster guts also got on my nerves, but i’ll just chalk that up to just some kind of really weird difficulty thing. it was annoying until i tracked down the stronger monsters.)
the story is probably the weakest part of the game to me. it’s really hard to have a baseline investment when you don’t care about these characters, anyway, and what i saw in this game’s story still failed to endear me to hardly any of them. link’s role frustrated me; he just comes off like a tool rather than a character this time through, he barely has any actual relevancy to the story segments beyond being the guy who can use the master sword and being the player’s vehicle to get from point a to b in the story. the blank stare and limited emoting worked in botw because... there’s a given reason for his lack of outward emotion in the past, plus he has no memory in the present. it makes sense. but this time around, he’s gotten memories in the years between this and the last game, but he just feels like a background character in most of the story beats.
he has no role in the memories and in the present just exists to gather some stuff for other people, he gets the master sword from zelda and then helps the other sages get their secret stones, but he’s barely addressed as his own character in the grand scheme of things unless he’s being directly spoken to. he’s just the swordsman capable of wielding the master sword and zelda’s chosen protector as far as the story is concerned. he has no opinions outside of doing what he’s told and looking for zelda. at least not as far as i could really tell. at least in botw, the story directly concerns him, and it’s his story we’re following. this time around zelda and the sages seem like the most important characters, link’s just... there, doing what he’s been told to.
the new sages are fine, none of them really endeared themselves to me, and i will say that making the player watch essentially the exact same cutscene each time you finish a dungeon was BAFFLING. they were long and you learned almost nothing new after the first one, and there was nothing done to make them very distinct to each individual pair of sages or their respective regions; at the very least, it could have been interesting to meet the ancient sages not in the exact same stone garden, but perhaps at the top of a snowy mountain for the rito, near a volcano or something for the goron, maybe in a shallow pool of water for the zora, and in the desert for the gerudo- but no, they’re all effectively the same thing just with the speaking character swapped out with some minor changes.
(the sages themselves are a pain in the ass to use, having to chase them down to activate their power or accidentally activating a power when you don’t want it; yunobo was honestly my favorite, but because i generally defaulted to having them all activated at all times, i had a lot of trouble with tulin blowing shit away from me when i was trying to grab it while midair. they’re half-decent for combat)
i didn’t really care for rauru or sonia, either. rauru in the present as a ghost was fine, he was kind of interesting and seemed to have changed from his time in the past, but he never managed to be a character i particularly liked. i wasn’t really a fan of his... arrogance? or something in the past scenes, and he never really came off as very interesting. sonia was nearly completely uninteresting which is a shame since she has an interesting design, she just felt delegated to the role of supporting rauru and zelda and then dying to motivate them.
ganondorf is a character i was really looking forward to seeing, and it really fucking sucks that he’s so god damn one-dimensional this time! the story can’t be fucked to delve into him beyond just giving us scenes that just tell us that he’s evil and wants to rule hyrule and get the secret stones and nothing else because fuck having complex villains, i guess. especially frustrating because within the game itself you can draw more interesting motivations up for him, but the game really just doubles-down on him being evil for the fuck of it and wanting to end the world because uhhhh... he’s evil don’t fucking worry about it
the ignoring of the triforce in this game sucks in that way, too, because the way the triforce works and how it can grant wishes made it a much more interesting goal for ganondorf to attain, rather than some poorly-named ‘secret stones’ that do nothing more than just amplify power or something. it sucks how black-and-white this damn story is and how it seems like it just wants to do away with any possible nuance or gray area. no one but the bad guys or side characters are flawed in any actually interesting or significant way.
at least ganondorf was still the most interesting character in the flashbacks.
and then zelda, oh god ZELDA. i honestly really liked her in botw. i liked how you saw her as a flawed, insecure, pressured teen, and how you saw her struggles to relate to link and how she eventually warmed up to him. you saw her as a flawed person who develops and as someone who cares deeply about her friends and her duties and gets frustrated by her failings.
and then in totk a lot of her more interesting traits- her interest in sheikah tech, her excitement over field study and research, her more defining traits as this incarnation of zelda- are basically sanded down and she’s just this perfect flawless princess with great power and an insanely passive role in the past beyond finally taking some kind of action after one of her friends dies and she’s pushed to the brink. cool. great.
she has practically no flaw in totk. if anyone in the present talks about her, they have nothing bad to say and just want to please her and follow her orders, she is right in telling the gerudo how to train their troops she is right even when misheard to tell people to put themselves in danger and she is hardly meaningfully questioned when her imposter is doing very clearly suspicious shit. neither the story nor any of the characters wants to let her be flawed. she’s just perfect in damn near every way and barely retains any interesting characterization she got in botw. there are some interesting snippets in her being a teacher and setting up memorials to those who died in the calamity, but there’s hardly any more than that, and it makes it really hard for me to give a damn about her. she’s not interesting this time.
the whole thing with zelda becoming a dragon too, is... it’s fine. it’s ok. but the fact that she turns back at the end with no problem whatsoever is one hell of a fucking misstep. why talk about draconification being forbidden for a good reason anyways if it doesn’t actually matter anyways??? if you never actually see any of those fucking repercussions why even bring them up??? i really feel like it would have been more effective for there to have been actual consequences for zelda beyond just fucking flying around half-conscious for a millennium or whatever- have her lose her memory when she’s brought back! there you go! there’s the reason why draconification is forbidden! there’s the thing about losing yourself! plus, zelda losing her memories as a result would mirror link having lost his memories in botw! that has so much more weight and significance then ‘oh uh ignore the warnings from a while back she’s completely fine dw abt it’ i hate that she’s back just like that without any of the consequences that the game suggests.
the dragon’s tears in general kinda just felt weaker than botw’s memories anyways bc you’re more just. watching stuff happen then actually learning anything. it has less characters and yet i feel like you only get to know like half of the important ones. like three of them are all about the same event. a few times they just replay parts of old memories in new ones. if they ever reference a past memory they just show you what they’re referencing instead of leaving you to piece it together. just play the voices or something don’t break the flow of things to play a clip of something i’ve already seen.
plus the fact that totk... barely acknowledges that it’s a sequel to botw really rubs me the wrong way. i understand that loz is extremely loose with its lore, but totk is a direct sequel set in the same world a few years later, and yet the events and characters of botw have might as well been forgotten and its all either ignored, brushed aside, or straight up replaced by something else for no good reason. the continuity between these games is absolutely dismal and to see the different ways in which the events and concepts or botw are just... disregarded really just left a bad taste in my mouth.
just- i love good stories and worlds in video games, and while some games can coast by for me by feeling good to play, having a good and engaging story and characters is usually essential to my enjoyment of a game, and when i don’t care about to the point of disliking the story and characters, and when none of the important areas are fascinating or distinct enough from each other, and when the game even fails to really reel me in with the gameplay...
i wanted to like totk, but it really just did not work for me. i just ended up feeling frustrated and disappointed and even sometimes bored with all of the major stuff and man. totk is really, REALLY, not for me, and it just left me wanting to play older zelda games instead.
...
HOWEVER! there were actually some things i really loved about totk! it’s not all doom and gloom! (well, not all doom, at least)
so! the music was great! not all of it really fit or made a lot of sense with the context in which they played or failed to evoke the feeling they were meant to, but the new tracks in this game were great! i especially love the first two phases of the fire temple’s theme, the depths music, and most of the new battle and boss themes. zelda games almost never fail when it comes to the music.
i did genuinely like the fire temple- yunobo’s ability was used the best in this dungeon, and it had the best five switches gimmick, i loved how you had to hit the gongs (sometimes having to construct a path to account for the weaknesses of yunobo’s ability) and how it then ‘scared’ each of the five statues holding a part of the gate- it was very cute and fit in very well with the general feel of that part of the story. it was the best in terms of difficulty and complexity, but it didn’t have the best boss- the lightning temple had the best boss, and i will admit that even if most of them were easy, i really enjoyed the mirror puzzles, as well as the process to unlocking the dungeon. the wind temple had my favorite visual identity and aesthetic, though, i liked it being a part of this old rito song, and how it was the most distinct in looks from the other dungeons.
the sky islands were honestly fun, even if they weren’t all that interesting. getting to some of the harder-to-reach islands were some of my favorite times i had to use ultrahand, and stuff like the zonai forge island and the one orblike island with the mirror puzzle, and pretty much all of the more complicated parts of the sky islands were a lot of fun to explore and figure out.
being able to ride on the dragons was just really cool, and the fact that they come out of the chasms was fun.
the new horns for the monsters were cool, it helps differentiate the different monster strengths and i just thought they were really neat.
the quest with lurelin village was fun, even if the pirates just being monsters was a real let-down.
the stable trotters were also a fun bunch of characters, that was a good, new way to open up fairy fountains.
all of the new stuff with the yiga was really fun, like getting their outfit and being able to pretend to be one of them and learning the blademaster attack- so much fun it was so cute.
most of the new outfits are really good and useful, and while a bit janky and not that great, the house-building bit near tarrey was endearing.
while none of the main characters interested me, i really, especially liked tauro and yona and penn. for some reason they just appealed to me and i really wish they had bigger parts in the game because they’re interesting and they have good designs and i’d really like to know more about them.
the underground gerudo shelter was pretty cool, to be honest, and the look of the caves was really cool.
i adored the proving grounds shrines- easily my favorite shrines in the entire game, i had no problem spending a decent amount of time in those kinds of shrines, they were fantastic.
the new ingredients and recipes and new weapons were cool.
the way you basically return to the area you started at on your way to ganondorf is pretty cool, that whole path is really neat.
ganondorf in general was a pretty cool boss, even if he ended up being kind of easy for me. the whole final boss sequence was neat.
by FAR, though, my absolute favorite part of this game was 100% the depths. the fact that there was just an entire second layer to the map that was the same size as the surface, just inverted and dark and filled with new bosses and locations... i spent hours down there without going back up to the surface and absolutely had a BLAST screwing around in the dark, lighting up my path with brightblooms and tossing together little vehicles with lights so that i could get to the next lightroot off in the distance. the depths was probably where i ended up using zonai vehicles the most, and it was honestly pretty fun to go around spotting and reaching every lightroot, coming across different mines and weird little landforms and coliseums and yiga camps. the music and plantlife and look of the depths were so good, and it really felt distinct from the rest of the game in a very good way. doing all of the lightroots and getting enough zonaite to max out link’s energy cells was definitely a good move since it made finding shrines and dealing with later zonai machine stuff easier.
overall, tears of the kingdom was a severely mixed bag for me, and while there was stuff i did like, i don’t think it’s enough to really get me to say that i really liked this game overall- after all most of the stuff i disliked was unavoidable parts of the games, and it definitely put a hamper on my interest in the rest of the time. totk is fine, but it’s really not my thing.
#i just- *slams head into brick wall* bro i did not have a good time with this game#going back to my silly little comparison point; totk was $70 and my copy of phantom hourglass was $70#$70 is a bullshit amount for a game but thats no the point here#totk from a technical baseline standpoint as a GAME is worth $70#its story and the amount of enjoyment it gave me was not worth $70 tho. the story and enjoyment i got from ph was more worth $70 to me#salty talks#loz#legend of zelda#totk#'zelda games almost never fail when it comes to the music' if you talk shit abt ph's soundtrack i'll kill you. i like the dungeon track#i partially have the shinji chair image saved for this but i did also initally save it yesterday when i finished nge#listen this was fine on a surface level but it just wore me the fuck down#link was just some flavor of stonefaced or surprised or determined in any given cutscene and like. idk. wasnt too interested in him either#look i know about the silly little dialogue options. still didnt do it for me#link getting his arm back only makes sense to me bc i got every last light of blessing and heart container and stamina vessel#the gloom in his body is 100% gone hes squeaky clean for me. whyd you take his shirt off tho. at least keep his hat. cant take it seriously#put him in the archaic set or smth his arm is fully visible that way at least and its full circle thats what he wears at the start#couldnt take the whole grabbing zelda sequence seriously bc i missed the (hold) prompt and link flew away lol#totk spoilers#also wasnt really a fan of most of the voice acting yeah sorry. kinda rough all around aside from like ganondorf and dimitri- i mean rauru#mineru and the rito sage were fine too ig. im not going to bother watching any vids or whatever to check again#riju and sidon were fine too#sonia was cool too but everyone else was a lil rough tbh esp with having to say 'secret stone' that name sucks shit#my switch died in the middle of the credits. i had like 25% when i started fighting ganondorf.#it died twice actually cuz i charged it for a few minutes and what like yeah 5% should be good and nope. died again#anyways whatever. im not giving it a rating im tired of this game i dont think i'll be replaying or even just touching it any time soon#music was top notch again tho. made me feel stuff more than the actual story did. cool ig#bitching abt totk
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5 Random Things
Ah yes a very clear title for you hehe. Another not-entirely-tes tag game, which, since I've been relatively deep in the hyperfocus I thought I'd surface and do a couple of these before diving back in lol.
I was tagged by @dirty-bosmer to share 5 random things I enjoy! (Their post is here!)
I will tag @paraparadigm, @changelingsandothernonsense, @thana-topsy, @archangelsunited, @snippetsrus, @kookaburra1701, @friend-of-giants, @elfinismsarts, @thequeenofthewinter, @rainpebble3 and anyone else who'd like to write one of these!
Chicory Coffee which baffles a few people in my household, and I enjoy that too. I've been calling it canis root tea for funsies because I feel like that's basically the tamrielic equivalent. There's really nothing else like it, I don't know how to explain why I love it so much. But I have that as frequently as regular coffee despite less caffeine -- I have the kind that's mixed with regular coffee. Otherwise it'd be caffeine free lol
The Legend of Zelda which is my favorite game series of all time, followed close by Elder Scrolls, of course. The reason is because I've been playing these games since the days of the NES lol though as a small child I had absolutely no idea how to puzzle through that first game. It still brings me joy though. Tears of the Kingdom is very fun, but I think my favorite remains Breath of the Wild.
Mechanical Keyboards. Even inexpensive ones. They are extremely fun to pull apart and repair or redesign, plus I love the noise feedback. I do less typos on these things, plus they're pretty. What's not to like, honestly? A very writerly/gamerly thing of me to say.
Dungeons & Dragons. Oh look another game on the list, hehe. This one sort of combines everything I love about video games with everything I love about storytelling. I've been a DM before and seriously enjoy the world-building aspect and the absolute chaotic nonsense that players can create. I might enjoy being a pc more for causing said shenanigans :> Also, dnd dice. Shiny 🤩
Sketching. I don't share my art on my blog because I usually draw Pokemon if I'm being honest LOL but the act of just sketching for the sake of sketching or learning more about drawing is super soothing to me. No pressure to share them, no pressure to get them right. I just draw because I can. Though sometimes I will write apologies in the margin if a sketch turns out really fucked up. :> But even then, it's all part of the process.
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5 9 and 18 for the loz/lu ask!!
5. Which Link is your favorite?
Sky and Warriors! Sky's my number one, but I think Warriors is the one who somehow shows up whenever I try to create anything, LOL. Doodling? Warriors. Writing? Oh shit he's a main character now. I sure don't know how he got here. I'm also quite partial to Four.
9. What Legend of Zelda games have you played?
... I'm gonna preface this with the fact that I have SO much anxiety over things like games and shows. But I've played partway through BOTW, Skyward Sword and A Link Between Worlds. I got frightened out of playing BOTW by the concept of entering the Divine Beasts. I gave up at Faron Woods while playing Skyward Sword, which is literally like... right after the tutorial. And I was actually making decent progress through ALBW before the 2DS my friend gifted me broke. So. This probably says a lot about me LOL.
I DID finish TOTK, though. The only reason? My friend @defenestration13 was going to finish it, and I thought it'd be super funny if I beat it before them. (It was. It was so funny. Expectation subversion makes everything better.) They also had to goad me into completing the Lightning Temple before that because I was terrified. It was fun, though. (It did take me a week to get to Lookout Landing after finishing the Great Sky Islands though. My boots.... sufficiently quaked, shall we say.)
18. Which LoZ dungeon is your favorite?
Of the ones I've played? I really liked the Stormwind Ark from TOTK, especially the boss. It was the first dungeon in the BOTW/TOTK era I'd played. Genuinely took my breath away. It was an EASY boss, sure, but the spectacle was immeasurable. (Save for the final boss of TOTK.) I prefer puzzles from the older games, though. (Even though I've consumed them mostly via playthroughs.)
Of the ones I've WATCHED... I like Snowpeak Mansion. It was charming and had fun puzzles. Plus I love Yeto and Yeta, so that's a bonus.
Thanks for the ask! I continue to answer like one ask a day LOL
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Okay, so, I did Realm of Light Pt. III yesterday but it was late and I was tired so I figured it would be better to wait to write down my thoughts. So, here they are:
So far, this is the best quest in the questline (admittedly not a high bar since Pt. I was just unremarkable setup and you all know my thoughts on Pt. II). That might change but as of now its my favorite.
Dullahan (who, fun fact, is named after a creature from Irish Folklore commonly depicted as a headless horserider, which is appropriate) is pretty well written and I genuinely feel for him (again, I should note that I am using the Voices of Wynn Mod so the Voice Acting, which for Dullahan is really good, is gonna play a factor in my opinion). I understand where he's coming from and why he's acting the way he is. Him blaming Lari for being the way he is and feeling betrayed by her makes total sense.
I find his argument about necessity a lot more compelling partly because he didn't open with "Kill an innocent person (well, innocent is a a stretch, he was complicit in Urelix's experiments, but he was more innocent than Urelix himself, who was standing right next to him) who can't fight back and condemn hundreds of people to a horrible fate, by the way you have no choice in the matter but we're going to pretend that you do" sorry, getting off track. Point is, I find Dullahan more convincing than Orphion, which admittedly may be in large part due to the fact that I like Dulla and really don't like Orphion. Plus Dulla sounds like he's actually trying to make an argument instead of Orphion basically going "Necessity trumps morality. You agree. Reblog."
Moving on, seeing the consequences of Lari's actions. Yes, we see it in the present day through the Decay but that's a broader problem that's harder to get emotionally invested in and is really more of a side-effect than anything. Meanwhile, Dullahan being the way he is is a direct consequence of Lari's actions. Her refusal to kill the Parasite led to him being infected with whatever brain worm the Parasite put in him. And if he hadn't been infected with the brain worm, the Villagers wouldn't have killed him (granted, I would argue that the Villagers' actions can only be blamed on themselves but Dullahan certainly blames Lari and I assume Lari blames herself). And if the Villagers hadn't killed him, Lari wouldn't have tried to bring him back. Etc, etc, you get the point. The consequences of Lari's refusal to kill are a lot more personal now, so the "necessity over morality" argument is a lot more convincing.
The presentation of the quest is a lot better than the previous two, since it plays out a lot like a Dungeon as opposed to the previous two basically being glorified Caves (Pt II in particular gets dangerously close to being a dreaded walking simulator). The castle has a great atmosphere and slowly getting bits and pieces of Dullahan's backstory by jumping into paintings and seeing his memories play out is a really good way of expositing it too us (certainly better than Orphion's tell don't show approach). Also, I genuinely enjoyed exploring the castle and all of the puzzles and even the parkour sections were fun, and I really don't like parkour cause I'm bad at it (I do have to wonder if that last jump during the section where you run from the explosion is possible or if its meant to be that the only way to make it is to use your movement spell, though). My only problem was that one room where you've gotta kill the ghosts of a bunch of villagers too move on, there were just too many so even with the crowd control I get from Shaman I got overwhelmed.
I really like Dullahan's lines as you make it through the castle. Starting with mild interest as too why you entered the castle of your own free will and slowly getting more and more furious as you force him too relive his old memories. Seriously, Dullahan basically proves my point about how the Parasite (and Orphian too, honestly) suffers from not being an actual character.
I will admit that I do kinda agree with Dullahan when he asks you what you hope too gain by sifting through his memories because you don't really have a reason too other than that's what the quest says. You're here to drive out Dullahan's spirit cause he keeps kidnapping souls, not travel into paintings too see his memories. Is it just curiosity? You just have to know how it ends (I mean, that's my motivation, obviously, but I'm looking for a Watsonian answer here)? I'd understand it if Lari or Orphion was like "Yeah, go visit this creepy castle to get the real deets" but that's not the reason we're here.
So, yeah, those are my thoughts on RoL Pt. III. Might take a bit too get too Part IV cause I don't think I'm high enough level yet but I'll probably have thoughts on that too.
PS. Kicking myself cause I forgot too record the latter half of the quest and I wanted too do a video essay on the full questline when I completed it.
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So now that it's been a bit and I've played a lot more of the game it is time for my thoughts on Tears of the Kingdom. I'm not the biggest fan of Breath of the Wild though I've come to appreciate it more over time. It's still a game I've never beat because I generally get bored part way through, though. Similar to other openworld games I've liked. I enjoy playing it but not enough to beat the game and certainly not enough to get all 120 shrines done. This is for a lot of reasons and thankfully TotK has addressed basically all of them.
I suppose the one that most people can agree on is the durability issue. I hated BotW's durability system as it made me afraid to use any of my cooler weapons. TotK's fuse mechanic has mostly solved this issue since I no longer go "But what if I need this?" since I can realistically just make another one and even if I don't have the materials, I likely have access to a zonai device or a consumable that'll have a similar effect if thrown/shot. I think this is not just the fuse power that is achieving this effect. I think it's the mixture of fuse, the throwables, the greater availability of arrows, the zonai devices and things like the grave weapon spawns. There's just such a great variety of ways I can hurt things that I'm no longer afraid of actually using my shit because I feel like I always have access to other things. The combination has beat my anxiety around item use.
The other big area that I wanted improvement on was dungeons and the dungeon quests. This has generally been achieved. The dungeons are better designed than BotW's I feel but most importantly they are different in their theming and have unique bosses per temple. Colgera and Armored Gohma are two very different bosses, not just in looks but in function. Also they feel a lot more traditionally Zelda boss than the Blights did. Because they're little puzzle bosses that you solve that aren't very hard once you do figure out that solution. And the solutions aren't that hard to figure out. I also think they're better spectacles than the Blights? Which is the other thing with Zelda bosses in the 3D games. They're big spectacle set pieces.
Lead ups to the dungeons have felt more varied than BotW's and these have generally been very fun to do. I still haven't done the Zora one but I have done the other three and liked them each quite a bit. My favorite being the Rito one because that's just a very fun little thing to do. I do think the story is very truncated, though. More akin to the amount of story you'd get out of a Ocarina of Time dungeon lead up than a Twilight Princess one. Which is fine. I do ultimately prefer the more story heavy stuff but this is a decent amount of it.
I think my favorite discovery with the dungeons though is that dungeon items and companions are back in a one-two combo. They function differently than they did in the older games and the things are just conveniences when taken out of their respective dungeons but I really, really love that two of my favorite Zelda elements are back. I do think that the method of power activation is awkward, though. I'd far prefer it be a wheel or something. Or like in the next game they remove the fucking horse whistle button and make that the menu for dungeon powers. As is, having to chase Riju down during combat to activate her power kind of sucks ass. I do generally like the powers and the companions though. I especially like how they tie into the final boss (I've only seen phase 1 of this due to dying and being like "Well we're not doing that now").
Variety was another big issue I had and that's thankfully been solved. As in addition to the shrines there's caves. There's also a lot more shrines that have their puzzles solved outside them. Which helps keep the dreaded "I am tired of looking at these fucking walls" feelings at bay. The addition of two different kinds of overworld traversal on top of that is helping too. The sky islands are basically what I wanted Wind Waker's islands to be and they're extremely nice uses of the new traversal tools you have in TotK. And the Depths, while a simple mirroring of the top, do have the light mechanic and the different shaped terrain and gloom to deal with. I do think that more could be done with the Depths, though. It needed more quests associated with it I feel. Maybe a town down there to serve as a hub.
The story is where I am more conflicted. I do prefer this structure to BotW's. There are a lot more discrete steps to the main story. But the cutscenes are still limited basically to just the memories. I would prefer the cutscenes occur during the actual game more, as opposed to some other shit I don't interact with at all. In terms of the actual story itself...I have never been under any impression that Ganondorf or Zelda would be better handled in this game than in past ones. I am extremely fucking disappointed they aren't but I was also expecting this. Ganondorf's just an evil power hungry asshole with little else going on and Zelda is continuing to have to sacrifice herself so Hylia's favorite himbo can do cool shit.
The way Zelda is handled in particular bothers me. I like her story overall but when viewed in context with the entire rest of the franchise and with BotW versus Age of Calamity it's just kind of infuriating. So congratulations WW and TP Zeldas. You are no longer the Zeldas done most dirty. That prize now is awarded to BotW Zelda. Handily. In a series where I have to say that OoT Zelda was one of the more impressively handled ones. When all she did was dress up as a ninja, say cryptic shit and give you songs. I am really kind of Unhappy with this doubling down. Especially when she is walking around with you in the opening bit. Also fucking christ they took her personality away again when she put on the fucking dress. This is a series where any time anyone but Nintendo gets their hands on the property they give her more to do because turns out people really love Zelda. But Nintendo cannot give up on their rigid bullshit.
Overall I do like the story but I am growing increasingly sick of how Zelda is consistently treated.
Let's get back to more positive things...The shrine design is ultimately much better I think. There aren't any that overstay their welcome and, again, many of them have their puzzles done in the overworld. Of the kinds of puzzles you see inside them, I think these are done a lot better. The Proving Grounds in particular fuck. They took the best elements of Eventide Island and replaced the fucking Tests of Strength with something that is actually fun and interesting. The only problem I have with Proving Grounds is that there aren't enough of them. I'm also super happy to see the awful motion control shrines are gone, as are the golf shrines. There are still some physics shrines like the god awful baseball one but these are fewer and far between. And even with the ones that show up their concepts are unique as opposed to "Here's another golf course, asshole". I also think that the way the shrines actually teach you things that are useful outside of them is nice. Both the building shrines and Proving Grounds teach you useful concepts you can make use of in the rest of the game.
Progression through the game I am also finding a lot better for a player like me. I did not work as well with the breadcrumbing method as many others did. So having a lot more things be tied to main story progression and having a lot more things be based around talking to the NPCs is doing a lot for me. This along with the greater amount of shit in the overworld to explore has made it so I'm never struggling to find interesting things to do. This does frustrate other players though and I am wondering if some better method of this can be done in the next game. One that satisfies players like me who need the greater amount of guidance and those who feel very stifled by it.
TotK is thus far one of the most engaging Zelda experiences I've had. And as a diehard for the older Zelda games this has done a lot to help ease me into this new direction for the series. I think if the team can take the things they did well here and keep expanding on this then Zelda is in a very good spot for both varieties of Zelda fan. They do still have a lot of work that needs to be done though. The story's still not quite there yet and the dungeon items can be improved. But this is a very good step forward. Still no double clawshots though so 0/10.
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Wrath of the Righteous Thoughts
Because @self-loving-vampire asked and I can't sleep, scattered and incoherent because it's like 3am
I would have liked this game significantly better if it was somehow a visual novel - started lowering the difficulty in the final dungeon because all the tough-but-contextless demon fights just got tedious
But I did like it! And at 128 hours of playtime for like $40 I really don't have much room to complain tbh
Companions were mostly actually good! To the extent that I'm tempted to ever replay this game, it's to play less of a robotic merciless bitch and get closer to the ones I mostly ignored/ended up killing
Ember and Aru probably had the best personal plots, with the best writing and most, like, relevance. Daeran's seems like it would have been great if I'd really used him at all. Laan and Seelah's arcs were well executed but super generic. Camellia is such an edgy bitch I'm half tempted to do an evil playthrough next entirely to see hers through to the end. Regil and Greybor's companion quests seem to exist entirely because they're expected, and neither really seemed to actually have any sort of arc at all. I don't care about cleric dude or his brother enough to have an opinion on theirs.
Oh also autistic foxgirl wizard was fun but I'm not doing any quest that involves hunting for random masks across the entire map so I can remember to double back and complete an elaborate puzzle, sorry. Hope her plot was cool, though
Generally, I appreciate there must be an audience for all the puzzles strewn around everywhere. I am not one of them. Every time you actually needed to complete one I used a guide, and every other time I ignored them.
Actually a pretty big fan of the crusade managment, but wish it had more depth? And wasn't so trivial - by the time I got any of my cool endgame mythic units, I'd already cleared the entire map with my deathstack of marksmen, signifiers and hellknights. The 'final boss' such as it was - the 15 strength champions of the abyss from hitting mil level 8 - was just kind of pathetic. The level up choices were fun, though!
Wish my being an Aeon had come up more in that area, though - in the acutal plot it was gratifyingly relavent pretty often, but in the NPC interactions in the citadel it was barely ever mentioned. Even after exiling all the failiable corrupt humans form my city and importing axiomites and inevitables to replace them.
Aeon quest was a real highlight generally, tbh, even though it was totally at odds with how the mythic spark was treated by the narrative - demonic corruption, etc, etc - generally. Feel like demon or angel would fit more naturally in the narrative. Not that I'm ever going to do either of those.
Like I can't emphasize enough how there was literally 2-5x more fights than were at all fun or interesting, and I deserve compensation for every time I had to rest and then reapply buffs
My understanding of the actual main plot should probably not be given too much consideration because the game outright scolded me for missing the main villain's backstory exposition in her secret lab and Iz but as a general high fantasy power fantasy thing it was fine? Like, the character writing is the selling point here, not the actual overall plot tbc, but it was well executed and hit the important beats of the genre imo.
It's legitimately hilarious and incredible stupid how many places you can - and indeed often have to - just set up a tent and get a good night's sleep in the middle of raiding some demon lair or enemy fortress with a trail of bloody carnage behind you and just, no one ever has any problem with this. The demons always wait patiently for you to have breakfast and put the ten away before continuing to slaughter them.
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Wasteland 3 was on sale a little while back and I've been wanting to play that since I saw it existed. Most people don't know this game series existed. Those who do, know it from fallout, and probably never touched the games before. Those who know it from fallout know it from old fallout. Back when they was 2d and played like a point and click that threw the simple item puzzles into the sun and decided to dungeon master a dnd game but with guns and robots. Plus, the original game is archaic and has graphics that more resemble a board game than a video game, and the second game came out like 20 years later. I mean I'm all over ancient and archaic games, and I only have managed to ever scrape my way through half of that thing. I even used a guide. I beat zelda nes without pulling a guide out until that teleport maze in the final dungeon.
So anyway, wasteland 3 is now my favorite rpg, and I've been reevaluating a few of my projects because of it. I have a number of games that can be loosely crammed into the definitions of RPG. And I missed something crutial with my party based one: specialization. Now I missed wasteland 2, but my previous favorite rpg was fallout 1. And that game only let you directly control and stat manage one character. You could get companions, but they didn't factor into things the same way. Wasteland, having always been a game where you control a team of post nuclear idealists with government issued integrity, does not let you make a god teir character like in fallout. The third game makes you make a team. This team can and will be more effective than any single player rpg protagonist for a number of reasons, and it is very hard to fuck it up. I love the shit out of how well they get this across. Like, I could go into depth about how wasteland 3's opening bit is one of the best tutorials ever crafted. Rides a real nice balence of understanding what players might expect going into that, making them rethink their approach, and showing off just how fun and rewarding that all can be. Sort of un-hack-and-slashing the rpg system, while also making sure to be as brutal and rediculous as possible.
Funny thing is, I already kind of understood the importance of this kind of specialization when designing concepts for a real-time tactical third person shooter. Trying to lean into the mmo tank, healer, hitter trio that seems so inexcapable. Healers and tanks are tricky, if possible to do in wasteland 3 though, and that's what I think is really facinating. As far as I can tell, you can't do that without fundementally changing how these kinds of games function, but this does it pretty well, at least early on, and I'm trying to work out exactly how? Healers are somewhat negated by the fact that it's hard to play that kind of support role. Meaning every character that would be put in risky situations frequently, has to be capable of healing themselves. Tanks are less viable cause the combat relies a lot on cover and damage mitigation by default, meaning everyone again, kind of has to do all of that themselves. I think what's going on is what happens outside of combat.
Wasteland stats are funny, cause they were a fucking mess in the 80s game. You had to roll the damn characters, then tag a number of skills. And it was not clear what all of them did. And half of them might not actually do anything. Fallout used a similar system, with atributes and skills, but in a much more coherent way. The details of the SPECIAL system has been praised before, just know it used to be significantly more in depth than the nonsense in fallout 3 and onwards. Wasteland 3, and from what I can tell, 2 as well, uses a similar system, this time spelling CLASSIC cause tradition at this point. Comes complete with perks and backgrounds to further customize your rangers with little tweeks like doing more damage in exchange for getting hit for more damage, or getting more action points when you kill an enemy. The long winded point I was getting to is that the vast majority of skills are not combat skills, but exploration skills. Arguably, the only reason combat skills are seperated out so much is to keep everyone using different ammo pools. If you want a good balenced squad, you want one, maybe two combat skills per char, and the rest going into stuff like the speech and trading skills, repair and computers. Maybe some weapons experts or power armor mechanics. Cause these let you avoid fights. Or at least help getting better gear and the jump on things you have to fight.
Game isn't perfect, but it's by far one of the best designed crpg's I've ever touched, and very fun in a lot of ways. Almost makes me actually enjoy math. That's hard to do. I only math when I need to, and it takes all the energy my two brain cells can squeeze out.
And like, drawings here later maybe. I keep not drawing as much as I want to. There's a ton of cool stuff I'd like to show off, but I didn't get around to sketching the mf's out yet. Hopefully I get around to doing that and whoever's here can look at more than my badly structured ramblings.
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A ramble about Breath of the Wild's difficulty level;
I've poured more hours into Breath of the Wild than I probably should have, perhaps only outdone by my last obsession with Animal Crossing New Leaf. I’ve finished the game twice, and decided I wanted another go. Let me say; it’s rare to come across a game so captivating it makes you want to pour in another 150 hours to see every detail all over again.
My first time playing the game, I was pretty bad at it by any gamer’s standards. If I wanted to go somewhere, I’d quite literally go as the crow flies. I’d cross cliffs, attempt to jump huge rivers, swim across lakes; because, apparently, I’d never heard of roads. At every enemy, I chose flight over fight. I forgot to prepare food before every venture from a stable. There was no strategy, no direction, no intent. I once tried to befriend wizzrobes because I thought they were fairies, and I’ll die disappointed about it.
But I think that was why it was fun. I played the game like a 6 year-old who just wanted to ride horses and find out what happened to Zelda. And the game let me. Unlike most games, where you can only access certain parts of the map at certain levels, I could go the most illogical way possible and this game would just laugh and wish me good luck. I didn’t get stuck, like ever, because I wasn’t bogged down figuring out how it was supposed to be played, how someone else was expecting me to get unstuck.
My second time, I knew the tricks. I knew there were roads and bridges, I knew how to fight from the offset, I knew which enemies were too dangerous to take at the beginning, and how to find everything. This time, I went to Gerudo town first so I could get the magic jewellery, because I knew it would be helpful on the way to getting the proper armour. I played the game the way it was perhaps not so much intended to be – for Breath of the Wild there is, of course, no intended way – but expected to be. Eventually though, I got bored. I didn’t have the patience to drag my heels through the completion of every shrine and puzzle. I just fought Ganon so I could finish the game and start over. Another nice option, might I add.
But why? Well, there was no challenge anymore. I knew how to beat every enemy, what was where. I knew to visit the castle dungeon mid-game to get the goods rather than right at the end where they were little use. I knew every twist and turn, every memory scene, most of the secrets in the map. But it just felt like I was walking in my old footsteps with less wonder and less to discover.
I love Breath of the Wild. I wanted to traverse its wonderful universe a hundred times. But I couldn't just do the same thing a third time, what was the point? I needed something new. A challenge. So on my third playthrough, I had some new rules:
No upgrading hearts or stamina. I could collect every spirit orb in the game, but it wasn’t allowed.
No upgrading runes.
No using the champion gifts, even if I had earned them fair and square.
No fancy clothes. Basic Hylian clothes only. And the warm doublet, ‘cause I said so.
No upgrading clothes either. Not that I’d miss the fairies.
Now, this put me in an interesting position. I played through the Great Plateau as normal, and enjoyed it as I always did. There’s something about it, it’s just my favourite part. Perhaps it’s the secluded area, perhaps the small space as you build from zero. Or maybe the stronger link to the story at that point in the game. I’ve never been sure. But the moment I set foot on Hyrule kingdom soil, there was no more normal; and in a good way.
At this point, I hadn’t considered any other changes to my playthrough, so I set off down the beaten track towards Kakariko village…for maybe 2-3 minutes?. I saw the Bridge of Hylia, and I turned right. Impa could wait.
And it was a great decision. The Faron region is the only one you’re not really directed to in your main quest, when you think about it. Most regions are home to an important village, a major path, or an area where at least part of the main quest takes place. Excluding Akkala, but there’s plenty of direction towards it. So what directs people to Faron? There’s only one memory there, and it’s right on the outskirts. Either you’re aiming for completion, or you’re just plain curious. The latter is the beauty of the game.
The only area that really has a difficulty level intended for a specific point in the game is the Duelling peaks, and to an extent Hateno, suited to be easier in the beginning. So Faron was a fun choice for a first region. Storms, the lightning god, a jungle, a peaceful village unaffected by your main quest? Perfect.
I had my knowledge of how to fight, and of different enemies and whatnot, but I was still in for a shock. Oh yeah. Where most of us would brush a couple of Stalmoblins off, they were a one hit killer for me, and I quickly learned I couldn’t take three at once without getting hit. A rude awakening. So travelling at night was out. I also quickly found I had to restock food at every cookpot, because there was no point in carrying a ten heart meal. Just lots of burnt fish and mushrooms. Classy.
But the biggest change (and my favourite) was the combat. I’m aware that you can buy master mode if you want to make the game more challenging, but what does it change? You take more damage, enemies are stronger, your weapons break more often. To me, that honestly sounds very frustrating. It makes the technical combat more difficult, but it doesn’t change how you approach it. That, for me anyway, was the fun bit.
I remember early in my first playthrough, I was sent to raid a beach camp near Hateno village to rescue some sheep. At this point, I was still a terrible fighter (and a bit of a wimp), so I picked the monsters off one by one with remote bombs until there were few enough to take in one go. It took a while, sure, but hell was it a satisfying victory. Now, two playthroughs later, it was back to that kind of strategy. Analyse your surroundings for things to drop or to blow up, approach from the right place, bait monsters out to you, pick them off one by one. Granted, I failed a lot – I’m still not a great fighter by any stretch of the imagination– but I was thinking about what I was doing, so every victory felt more earned.
The most satisfying win I’ve had so far was against a lynel. (No, I wasn’t going to hide from them this time, I’m slightly less of a wimp.) So, I thought back to how I normally fight a lynel. Stasis, hit, wait to recharge, repeat until dead. But that strategy had some beef with my little rulebook – No stasis +.
Which turned out to be pretty brilliant.
In my previous victories against lynels (few and far between, if I’m honest), I had never really taken the time to watch how they fought, I’d just ran around waiting for my stasis to recharge. However, upon watching, I noticed they don’t have too many moves, really.
Their close combat moves feature a cross slash and a heavy swing, dodged by backflip, as well as a charge attack which can be avoided with a side hop, both allowing me to get my hits in with a flurry rush. (which were my best friend this playthrough, even on bokoblins)
They also featured a move where they breathe fire – my personal favourite, because for the lynel of Ploymous mountain, he was standing on grass. When this move was featured, I could glide on the updraft, and draw my bow.
Now, a general rule when fighting a lynel is never draw your bow. You draw your bow, they draw theirs. Big mistake.
My first encounter with a lynel way back when was with the one on the Naydra snowfield. Here, I had a similar situation as with the wizzrobes. You see I thought, ladies and gentlemen, that the lynel was a centaur. Like an npc creature. That I should go and talk to. Until, of course, I saw the dreaded yellow exclamation mark and knew I had royally screwed myself over. I ran, only to find that their arrows could HONE IN ON YOU LIKE MISSILES, and I was dead in less than ten seconds. You can draw a number of conclusions about my intelligence from this, but the important lesson is never to let a lynel draw its bow.
Once yours is in hand, the only way to stop it from doing so is to shoot it in the face, stun it, then put your bow away. But on the ground, you have no chance of this hit before you’re trampled. From the air, however, the time freeze allows you to take the shot, drop to the ground, and perform the legendary move of mounting a lynel.
Did it take some trial and error to figure this out? Absolutely. Would I have figured it out if I hadn’t put myself in the position where I had to? Probably not. And I certainly wouldn’t have been able to ramble about it like a 5 year old at a birthday party if I hadn’t.
To me, that’s what makes videogames exciting, especially ones like Breath of the Wild, where you’re constantly figuring out new ways to do things. If any of you have ever played Splatoon, think about what’s more fun; Shooting your enemies down, or surprising them as you jump out from the trail of a curling bomb and splashdown three people at once? The rewarding part of the fighting aspect of gaming is winning in the ways that no one, sometimes not even yourself, expects. I don’t imagine everyone feels the same way; there is, of course, a certain pleasure to just blasting them. But this is true for me.
I also feel like, as you move through Breath of the Wild, you get a lot of great tips on creative fighting; from npcs, loading screens, and hidden all over the game, but many of them quickly become irrelevant. Taking out a bokoblin camp with magnesis is all great until you have seven hearts and can run in and mow them down in 20 seconds. During this playthrough, I actually learned a lot of tactics I could apply in the overworld through shrine puzzles.
In my early game exploration of Faron, I encountered an area of constant thunderstorm, caused by a shrine. The shrine was at the top of a massive waterfall. First thing that comes to your head? Yep. Zora armour. But by my rules, that wasn’t an option. Next? Climb the cliff and rest on its ledges. Bad news; with one wheel of stamina and constant rain, that wasn’t happening either. So what would I do? Come back later? In any other situation, yes, but this time, later in the game I’d still have no fancy armour, and no more stamina. So I had just as much chance of success now as I would later.
I am admittedly proud to say I did figure it out. The solution was found in a rather annoying shrine puzzle, where you had to lead one of those giant Sheikah orbs along a waterfall and into the hole. The goal was to use cryonis blocks to make a path for it. Incredibly pernickety and frustrating, but there was the solution, staring me in the face. A cryonis staircase up to the top of the waterfall.
It took a while, but it’s another example of using every tool at my disposal. The runes are an aspect of Breath of the Wild’s gameplay that is very creative, and very well used in overworld korok puzzles as well as shrines, but I think, rather underutilised in combat. That’s not to fault the design – the open nature of the game gives us the option, but most players would simply rather opt to use a royal broadsword, which is to be fair completely understandable.
This way of playing made the experience feel more human. If you were out in the wild, you’d need every trick in the book. You’d have to pick your battles - when you travel, what route you take, what you pack - very carefully. From the beginning of the game, Link is, let’s face it, already strong for a human/hylian. He can fight, he can take being stabbed a few times, withstand harsh environments for a decent amount of time, jog for way longer than I could dream, sprint a fair bit, climb sheer cliffs… He has the strength of your average soldier right off the bat. By the time you’re halfway through the game he’s frankly super-human. And yes, this kinda fits with the lore of the goddess’ chosen hero, but still; anyone who can get hit by a guardian’s laser square on and get back up is more than just abnormally strong.
And I’ve always been very interested in what it would be like to be a civilian during the events of the game. We laugh as travellers get beaten up by red bokoblins, but the truth of it is we’d probably be just like the truffle hunter girls. This time I suddenly didn’t feel so invincible against a black bokoblin, and the reality of the danger of Breath of Wild’s expansive world hit me. It’s not all pretty post-apocalypse of open fields and skies. I don’t think the urgency of the boss battle in universe quite hits any player in the vast expanse of pretty picture material, but during this playthrough the thought did occur. Not that it made me go any faster.
Really, my point is that even if you love obliterating sixteen monsters in one charge (‘cause same), I would still whole-heartedly recommend trying Breath of the Wild this way if you ever plan to play through it again. It gives a different take on the world and gameplay, which for me was very fun, and breathed a little new life into a game that was already brimming with it the first time. Games are best when you play them however you want. Solve problems with crazy backwards solutions. Play games like a happy little six year-old at Christmas. Sometimes making things difficult for yourself is fun, and who’s gonna stop you?
#breath of the wild#botw#botw analysis#botw gameplay#loz#legend of zelda#botw writing#lynel#loz botw#videogame analysis
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[Review] Severed (PSVita)
A very modern dungeon crawler for touchscreens!
I'm currently suffering through my first bout of Covid-19. It's been a miserable week so far, and one of the ways I've been getting through the days is playing portable games in bed. The Vita is so underappreciated and ticking this off my backlog helped me appreciate it all over again: the clicky buttons, thin and light form factor, and especially the large and gorgeous OLED screen. Severed is a game made for the Vita. Well, and for smartphones, 3DS, Wii U, etc... but the Vita is definitely one of the best ways to play it, probably.
Severed comes to us from the Canadian dev Drinkbox Studios. I loved both their Guacamelee games, and the art style of this is very similar: lots of bold colours, no outlines, otherworldly creature design. The atmosphere and tone here is darker though, with little humour outside of a slightly quirky NPC or two. This grim tale of a young woman in some kind of oppressive afterlife world, searching for her lost family, is a far cry from Juan and Tostada's bombastic adventures—although they do have some themes in common come to think of it—but told with just as much care and impact.
The gameplay is an interesting take on old first-person dungeon crawlers. You move between nodes or rooms, turning and stepping through them with the D-pad as you solve gate puzzles and navigate the labyrinthine structures. On the way you're frequently stopped by monsters in encounters that are preset so once you've cleared them you're free to explore and find secrets at your leisure. The minimap in the corner of the screen is so useful that I often found myself looking at it alone, and missing out on the lovely art of the main screen! It can also be expanded to plan your route which helps since there's no fast travel, but a small game world and the occasional shortcut can help if you want to backtrack.
Of course the main point of the game is the combat, which plays out via the touchscreen. Each monster type has particular ways to tackle them, and there's clear communication of their weak points, when to parry them, and so on. All this is done by swiping strategically: you can do flurries of short swipes, more damaging long swipes, and you'll gain the ability to charge or use spells to stun them or steal their buffs. Most encounters also feature multiple monsters that you have to constantly rotate between. It can be a bit overwhelming at times!
This whole mechanic is very polished and fun to engage with, although I had to step up my game later on as monster packs became more intimidating. Swiping on the responsive Vita capacitive touchscreen worked very well, although I'm partial to the precision of the Wii U's resistive touch with a stylus, so I'm sure it would be great there too. After defeating a monster is where the title mechanic comes into play (although the player character Sasha also lost her arm in the inciting attack, so it works on multiple levels).
By building up a focus meter you get a brief window to sever the limbs and appendages of monsters after killing them. There's a large variety of these sourced from the bestiary of baddies, and you can then spend your stock on a skill tree. I liked expanding my abilities and trading for parts to get an edge on the next battle, I felt it was well balanced. Exploring also can net you more parts or expansions to your health and mana, and the difficulty was tuned such that these felt rewarding, even necessary, although it's also possible to just... get better at honing your swiping reflexes and responses to particular monster behaviour.
I'm glad I lifted this one out of my backlog and finally gave it a go. It's very well made, the gameplay and presentation are slick and enjoyable, and it's got that unique combination of mechanics that make it stand out. The length also seems just right, the three dungeons plus backtracking taking me about six hours. I recommend this one but only if you take breaks to rest your wrist which has to hold the console while your other hand is swiping away... the Vita might actually be the lightest platform it's available on in fact, although resting your device on a cushion is also a good option.
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list of gripes i have with tears of the kingdom and reasons why I think it's not goty material
has no respect for my time. great fairies and hestu are the most blatant example of what I mean. if sonic frontiers could patch out this exact issue (adding an upgrade all at once button) there's no reason why a whole 5 years and a sequel later I still have to watch hestu shake his ass at me 7 times in a row instead of just handing him every korok seed at once. yes there's a skip button. no that's not good enough
filler content. awesome big map you've got there. and it's all just copy pasted shrines and koroks? wow this seems like a good use of my time (<- lie)
racism. I don't have the energy to elaborate im just bitching but like (waves at ganondorf)
imperialism. rauru is a coloniser and I hate that the story expects you to align yourself with him and I hate that none of the other leaders/sages are on the same level as himband I hate that he made ganondorf bow to him too.
misogyny. they damselled zelda again. complete lack of care for her character. she doesn't even get to be interesting in this one because the memories are too focused on (poorly) establishing the ancient conflict and rauru.
lack of consequences. link gets his normal arm back even though we were told at the beginning it was unsalvagable. zelda gets turned human and suffers no loss of memories or self she's just fine. why couldn't we do this earlier if all we needed was for mr and mrs imperialism ghosts to show up.
lack of any linearity. don't raise your eyebrows at me, I found the spirit temple way too early because it wasn't gated off and when I could finally do the kakariko quest that is supposed to lead to it I got pissed the fuck off because I'd already completed the quest and it was useless to me. why is it possible for me to reach that quests conclusion without the start? it's like hanging a fruit over my head and when I finally get to eat it it's just foam. gating off parts of your game until requirements are met isn't the fucking devil, it's basic game design.
storytelling in general. the lack of an active plot makes the story feel lacklustre. this game is better at it than botw was at least but the fact that we get to see so little of the main antagonist (because the past conflict, our main source of information/characterisation is seen through zeldas extremely limited pov) sucks. I like it when ganondorf gets to be a person actually. also watching the same cutscenes at the end of every fucking dungeon come on
dungeon design. we were promised a return to proper dungeons and we got Not That. better than the divine beasts for sure, but still ass. short, easy to navigate/cheat in, and unfulfilling. the thunder temple felt the most like a real dungeon, and it ended way too soon. shrines also suck btw
shrines also suck btw. I hate having these singular puzzles that I have to complete in order to get hearts. they break up the flow of gameplay and feel like a chore. id much rather just find fucking pieces of heart/stamina things. I'd rather just have real dungeons instead of breaking them up like this. why are there MORE than there were in botw
the way the gerudo treat you. misogyny AND racism. it feels uncomfortable the way you're treated by them, even though everyone here knows you're their saviour. gender essentialism is a fucking nightmare and I like to not have to deal with it in my games, thanks.
the game doesn't know what genre it is. it wants to be an open world/sandbox with the emphasis on ultrahand and building contraptions. it also wants to be an adventure rpg with puzzle solving and strong story focus. personally im not a fan of sandboxes - ultrahand did absolutely nothing for me when I wasn't being forced to use it. you can't have your cake and eat it too - the physics engine at play here is jaw dropping, don't get me wrong, but I bought zelda, not fucking gmod
it's too big. there's nothing in it. everything is copy pasted. it was fun to explore the first time around, but now I've seen everything I have no reason to visit it again. the depths and sky islands promised more, but end up just being more of the same.
sages being mapped to A and also forcing you to run up to npcs to use them. don't do that. why did you do that? why did you think this was appropriate. this complete mishandling of the sage abilities pisses me off the more I think about it. it shouldn't have gotten past testing. it's frustrating and I expect better fucking controller management from nintendo. jesus christ. you had 5 years and that was what you came up with?
5 years down the line, they did not fix any of the problems botw had. some things were handled a little better, some things were handled worse. nothing was fixed. if the next game is in the same map again, I'm skipping it I don't fucking care. if it's not, they'd better lose the fat - I don't want to have to wait 7 years for every game.
i can and happily will elaborate more on any of these points. story especially, all my gripes with the story and its presentation can't be boiled down to dot points. im tired and feel like bitching about how much this game frustrated me so it's dot points. I probably forgot something or another that pisses me off about it. I am probably biased, and I am definitely bitter. this game was disappointing, and the disappointment makes me frustrated with it. pikmin 4 sweep
#espeon cries#analysis#hater mode activated everyone play links awakening instead#criticising this game still feels like hitting a hornets nest and I don't want attention I just want to complain. so rbs are off
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i feel like the only person who’s been super let down by tears of the kingdom and it sucks :(
i’m a dedicated zelda fan, and there was plenty i loved about breath of the wild. i was excited to see what they could do to fix some of the problems i had with that game in the sequel but i feel like it’s already falling into the same traps.
mostly it’s about dungeon design for me. i haven’t played very much of tears of the kingdom yet, but i have played through the wind temple and i just found the experience so lackluster. the buildup is awesome, the setting is great, tulin’s ability is really fun to use. it’s just that the puzzles are so damn simple.
in older zelda games (and even to some extent in breath of the wild!) dungeons had a central puzzle idea/mechanic that they would build on as you progressed through the dungeon making the puzzles get more and more complex. breath of the wild at least had the divine beasts’ movement mechanics to focus each of the five independent puzzles in the dungeon on.
it was so disappointing to see that philosophy has gone away in tears of the kingdom. now we just get five completely independent dumbed down puzzles per dungeon and they’re all accessible from the moment you enter. i miss having to pick my way through dungeons and find locked doors/small keys to expand the dungeon.
your rune abilities are more complex/flexible now which admittedly makes each individual puzzle more satisfying to solve than some of the ones in breath of the wild, but i still desperately miss the feeling of cohesion and rising challenge/complexity in older games. sigh. i guess we really do have to say goodbye to the traditional dungeon structure though.
like i was already bored with breath of the wild’s dungeon design and this just feels like a step down from that even since we can’t control the dungeon’s movement anymore. sad
#the legend of zelda#tears of the kingdom#it would literally be so simple too#just scatter in some locked doors and small keys#design a few extra puzzles to hide the keys
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Top Games Played in 2023 - Number 4: Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past
4. Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past (SNES)
Despite playing quite a few different 2D Legend of Zelda games as a kid, I never stuck with one long enough to finish it. So I decided I should make Link to the Past the first one I finish.
So yes, I played this for the first time in 2023. Only 32 years late!
What I Like
After how disappointed I was by the dungeons in Breath of the Wild, I was so happy with the dungeons in this game. Every one of them was fun to navigate and had something unique going on. Puzzles are also much more decipherable for me in 2D, so I didn’t have to look things up. Going through dungeons has always been my favourite part of any Zelda game, so getting this right already made this one of my favourites in the series.
Most bosses are fun, even though they often don't require the dungeon item. There is at least one exception I’ll mention in the negatives section, but otherwise they were all fun and fairly fast encounters. The final boss in particular is very fun with how tight the time is to land hits. I played this on the SNES Classic, so I had save states from outside the boss rooms to help. I don’t know how bad it was to return from the closest continue point though, so the constant trial-and-error may not have been as fun originally.
The music is stellar, as expected of a first-party game on the SNES.
The world is fun to explore. I like that it’s small enough that you can get from point A to point B pretty quickly, but it’s so dense in terms of how far you can delve into each screen with the right approach. It’s very refreshing after BOTW was very wide but very empty.
What I Didn't Like
At the beginning of the game, the learning curve of moving around to dodge enemies was really high. Again this is my first 2D Zelda, so I was very bad at moving around with the D-Pad and maintain the right distance to attack enemies without getting hit. I did figure it out around the first dungeon, but it was a frustrating little while.
The shield is practically useless outside of some extremely specific situations.
In the late game, I easily ran out of things to spend Rupees on. Which isn’t a big problem, but it did make it disappointing when I puzzled my way to a treasure chest only to get Rupees I don’t need. And this is considering I found the upgrade fairy and considerably boosted my arrow and bomb capacity.
Some dungeon items are a letdown, like the armor. It’s also weird to get dungeon items that aren’t needed for bosses; 3D Zelda made me assume that’s the main thing they’re for.
Speaking of important items, I find it strange the Silver Arrows are required for the final boss but they're extremely missable! I nearly missed them myself.
Backtracking between World of Light and Dark feels much more complicated than any of the exploring beforehand, so it’s a big difficulty spike. It’s also where I pretty much gave up on getting secrets because there was too much to try with the world-switching.
I hate that stupid worm boss that pushes you off the platform and makes you start the file over. It's just frustrating. Arguably my least favourite Zelda boss ever.
Final Thoughts
I’m glad I finally got around to playing this. I understand why many people consider it the best Zelda game. It’s not my favourite, but I had a great time with it.
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So
I just beat Tears of the Kingdom
Thoughts under the cut because golly I have soooo many
OK SO THIS HAS IN JUST A WEEK ALONE BECOME NOT ONLY MY NEW FAVORITE ZELDA GAME BUT MY NEW FAVORITE GAME OF ALL TIME BECAUSE HOLY SHIT ITS INSANE
Ok, enough screaming, time for coherent thoughts. Sort of. First of all, the gameplay. Its SO fun. Honestly all of the arm mechanics are great; I still need to flex my creativity with ultrahand now that I’m done the game but once I do ohohoho it’s aaaaaaall over for you nerds. I used ascend SO much tbh, way more than I probably should have, same with recall. The puzzles are really nicely open ended in a way that allows you to use any of these abilities in whatever way you’d like really to solve them. The world itself is so much more fun to traverse using them and speaking of that world its HUGE. Like I’ve barely even scratched the surface of the Depths and I’m gonna be spending a lot of my post game trying to finally map it all out. I do wish there was a bit more going on in the sky but ah well. Exploring what’s there is still fun. The dungeons are pretty good, not the best the series has ever seen, but a major step up from the divine beasts for sure. Same with the boss fights. Though the final phase of the final boss was such an insane spectale like seriously I’m still struggling to believe something that cool happened in a Zelda game imo
The game performs... mostly well, though I did notice a few framerate dips here and there but I’m rarely one to get too worked up over that sort of thing. The way it takes a world that was familiar in Breath of the Wild and makes it look so fresh and new is outstanding. And the music? Amazing, like seriously this game’s main theme slaps so hard, not to mention the final final boss music? ohohohoho godddddd.
Ganondorf is exactly the despicable piece of shit I was hoping he’d be, the new characters like Rauru and Sonia and Mineru are fantastic editions to the Zelda cast and I can easily see them all becoming fan favorites. Seeing characters like Tulin, Yunobo, Sidon, and Riju have some major time to shine was great, and adventuring through the dungeons with them is a ton of fun! The side adventures/quests are also a lot more involved in this game, NPC interactions in general are just more fleshed out, and there’s just so much to do all across Hyrule, which leaves me with so much more to still get to now that I’m finished with it (still haven’t gotten all the shrines not to mention bubble gems; I’ll be playing this for a good long while even now that I’m done with it)
Then of course there’s the story which had me theorizing and second guessing myself right up to the very end. Like seriously, I yelled and laughed and screamed, and of course sobbed like a BABY over the ending. It took so many turns I wasn’t expecting and I really liked that! If botw already made you care about Zelda, this game took it too a whole new level. The memory cutscenes fucked me up and this game personally victimized my emotions and I’ll never recover but I love it so much for that. I’m already thinking through several fanfic concepts centered around this game even as we speak so yeah, like I said, I’ll never recover.
But anyway, overall, my first experience with ToTK has been an incredible one. It was well worth the wait, even better than I anticipated it would be, and will no doubt go down in history, just as BotW did before it, as one of the greatest games of all time. It certainly is in my book, anyway.
#jen rambles#tears of the kingdom#totk spoilers#ill be reblogging spoilery shit still with the same tags so make sure they're blacklisted#cause i cannot shut up about this fucking game hhhh#severe brainrot
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Atari 2600 Chronicles 1980 #1 - Adventure
Let's do a quick switcheroo here. Although Space Invaders seems to have a confirmed release date and Adventure does not, both appear to be from March 1980 and I actually had the chance to play the one earlier in the alphabet on my shiny new Atari 2600+! So do forgive my slight skewing of the chronology here.
Believe me, this system feels like magic in breathing new lives into these old as shit games. Yeah, playing them in a big meaty compilation is still nice and probably controls better in some cases, but nothing beats slamming in a cart, then using the original joystick and levers. You can really feel yourself fit into the mind of someone playing this system in the early 1980s.
As for the game itself? I have conflicting feelings. On one hand, it's a revolution. The ability to reset the game after being 'eaten' by a dragon/duck/abomination and for the progress to be retained after that is incredibly welcomed. I enjoy the puzzle solving aspect of it, very much too. Took me a good half hour to get the route of the full game figured out, and I can't deny and say I wanted more of it.
Then there's also the first BIG easter egg in gaming, the Warren Robinett credit that you get if you poke your head around in the Black Castle and find the tiny gray dot, essentially the final dungeon of the adventure. If you combine that with the randomized mode that comes included with the cart, you could get quite a lot of mileage out of speedrunning this one or challenging yourself via, for example, not using the sword or trying to go deathless.
That is a big *if* however. If you don't make up your own things to do, the randomized mode is all you have. And that one gets old dramatically fast. The bat-stealing-objects-mechanic is the prime example of a headache to me, but the worst part has to be continually going back into the painfully flickering zones this game contains. Whenever you get unlucky with the object spawns, get ready for your eyes to get gauged out!
I liked but didn't love Adventure. For everything it does right, there's another thing that makes it a hard sell. Good thing you can essentially sneeze this game up nowadays.
The Verdict
Graphics (3): Agh, yikes. I will compliment how well the game manages to articulate the extremely simple visuals via it's manual and worth of mouth. What happens on the screen however is crummy to the highest degree. Nothing more primitive than playing as a shape, using an arrow as a sword, while a derpy-looking bath toy hunts you down. The game world is hardly imaginative, the most sucked in I got was the feeling of actually being inside the castles in the first 3 seconds after entering. And i'll insist, the dark zones get so crowded sometimes that the screen flashes heavily and the game slows down! No offense to the legacy of the title, but the level of compensation to fit it on the cart was absolutely too much this time around.
Sound (6): The sounds that are there? Pretty fun. The sounds that aren't? Too plentiful to count. Most of the time, you're walking through silence. Only when there's action on the screen, like say, fighting a dragon, you get graced with some wackiness. Wouldn't have hurt to have a quiet walking noise in there, or even an attempt at music. Unfortunate that it gets bogged down like that, I cherish what was included.
Fun Factor (7): There's some fun left in the tank of this one. I played it largely blind other than knowing that there was that one easter egg of yore and having some bits and pieces of Youtube videos etched in my mind. The way the light exploration clicked in my head was worthwhile as all hell for someone who rarely plays 'complex' titles. Found myself happily surprised whenever I would see a new object or figured out a fast route to one of the castles, refreshing to have that element in there in such an early game.
Comes at a cost though. Once you're near the end game, and the bat has swapped around all your objects, it's exceptionally frustrating to have to go find them over and over again. The dragons start getting increasingly agressive too- the chalice seems to pull in the red one in particular. Pushing the reset button over and then get the enemy stuck in a place where it will kill ya nearly instant is still something I don't like 43 years later in a game like Minecraft. It gets worse in the randomized mode, once got all 3 dragons in the same place (a dark area, no less). Became so unplayable after that I quit then and there.
Yeah, mixed feelings!
Longevity (7): Enjoyment may vary. Either you wanna keep playing this after one finish in the second mode... or ya don't. I see myself popping this one on once or twice in the future. Having a randomized mode, flawed as it is, is very novel. In the 80s, this would've been like a 9/10 for that reason and the discovery of the easter egg some time later. Say it with me now, 'it's good compilation fodder'.
In Conclusion
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Link's Awakening DX (Review)
-Part 1: My History with the Series-
So, let's start with a bit of background. Before this year, I had never finished a Zelda game, or even played one for longer than an hour or two. I remember watching my dad play through the entirety of Ocarina of Time when I was a little kid, and I have hazy memories of trying out Wind Waker, Minish Cap and Majora's Mask. But for some reason, Zelda as a franchise never quite caught on with me. I had a mild interest and appreciation for the series from a distance, but certain aspects of the gameplay turned me off growing up. As a kid who loved platformers and Metroidvanias where fluidity of movement is vitally important, playing as Link in those games just felt awkward - he couldn't jump, he was sluggishly slow, it seemed as if you had to constantly go into your inventory to switch out items, and a lot of the puzzly elements felt obtuse, unintuitive, and dragged the pace even further to a crawl. For me it left the impression that Zelda simply wasn't a series I could enjoy playing.
As I got older, though, I can see how that may have changed. I got into more games where puzzles play a central role, like Portal and the Silent Hill series. In fact, Silent Hill's methodical lock-and-key based exploration isn't entirely dissimilar to Zelda's dungeon crawling! And a couple of my favorite games I've played in the past few years owe a massive debt to Zelda, wearing the influence proudly on their sleeves. The first, Nier Replicant, is structurally, narratively, and to some extent mechanically a twisted homage to Ocarina of Time. And my game of the year for 2022 (which I also reviewed!) is a little indie title named Tunic, which could not be more open in its reverence for Zelda if it tried.
My love for these two games, combined with my love for all the friends I have who've been pushing me to play some Zelda for ages now, is what finally got me excited enough to try Link's Awakening DX for the Game Boy Color.
-Part 2: In the Shadow of a Masterpiece-
Awakening is an odd little game and I'm coming at it from an odd place, too. You see, I started playing it a couple months ago, cleared six out of eight dungeons, got forcibly sidetracked by a heap of real life stuff, then two or three weeks ago I started on a different Zelda game that came before it, A Link to the Past, which I've now played, replayed, and even dipped into randomizer runs before finally coming back and finishing my Link's Awakening playthrough.
And I'm glad I did, because it threw into perspective just how much Awakening lives in the shadow of ALttP. It's a smaller entry on more limited hardware that serves as the follow up to a certified classic that laid the groundwork for decades of subsequent Zeldas and Zelda-likes to come. ALttP has not one but two sprawling overworlds that work in tandem with each other, and it marries exquisite combat scenarios with a strong puzzle solving element and an item based progression system reminiscent of Metroid. The items themselves are tremendously fun and addictive to use (the Pegasus Boots, the Hookshot, the Fire Rod, etc), with almost every piece of your eventual loadout remaining useful and serving an essential purpose in combat scenarios as well as exploration. A Link to the Past is jaw droppingly expansive yet compact, a tour de force of world and dungeon design where every piece fits perfectly in its place.
So why am I reviewing Link's Awakening instead, when it's a significantly weaker experience that never stood a chance against its wildly successful older brother? Well, for one thing, it's because there isn't much more I could say about ALttP that hasn't already been said better by other people, and I'd just keep gushing about how great is it for sixty paragraphs. And that's boring!! I'd rather talk to ya'll about a flawed, dinky little weirdo game that not as many people have played and celebrated.
And yes, I know there's a 2019 Switch remake of this game that rebuilds it from the ground up with new graphics and music, a better button layout, and even more secrets to find. (I've already dubbed it Link's Remakening when chatting with my friends.) But it was important to me to experience this game in an older form first to better appreciate its place in history and how that remake chooses to "modernize" it when I inevitably get around to playing that too. And hey, I think the way the best Game Boy titles made the most of their hardware is pretty neat! I find the "dated" graphics charming and it features a trio of composers that made excellent use of the sound chip, among them a brilliant lady named Minako Hamano, of Super Metroid and Metroid Fusion fame...or at least I wish she'd receive more fame and credit.
Because damn, when you first boot this game up you're hit with a stormy screen and a hauntingly foreboding piece of music, depicting Link on a raggedy little boat struggling to stay afloat in a violent sea that looks poised to swallow him whole. Then a strike of lightning comes down, the screen flashes, and we transition to a tranquil beachside while a far more mellow track plays. We see a lone girl walk down the shore to find an unconscious Link washed up on the sand. Then the camera pans up while the iconic Zelda theme kicks in and we see a distant mountain with a giant egg and a ring of clouds at its peak, as the title of the game appears at the top of the screen just like in the image I opened this review with.
-Part 3: An Island of Dreams-
This moody little intro immediately sets the tone and feel for Link's Awakening as a whole. It's a surreal, melancholy, dreamlike little game that appeals to the player's emotions through sound, subtle character moments, and imagery that will stay with you. While Awakening draws inspiration from ALttP in many respects, it also pulls away from it by telling a more intimate and personal story than the monomythic quest to save Hyrule.
That girl in the intro who rescues Link is named Marin, and the game proper begins with Link awakening (hehe) in her house. Her dad, Tarin, gives you back your shield and the two of them let you know that you're on Koholint Island and your sword should still be sitting around the beach somewhere.
Because Link is effectively you, the player, the game is trying to make you feel a couple things here. It wants you to like and care about Marin and her dad, so it has them be as nice and helpful to you as possible. And by extension, knowing there are monsters threatening them and their village gives you a reason to wanna protect this place in addition to solving whatever mysteries you may find here.
Awakening, you see, puts a lot of love and effort into its setting and NPCs. By injecting more flavor, sensitivity and humanity, with a cast of quirky oddballs, it left its mark on the Zelda series in a way that's still felt today. It even has an item trading sidequest that has you going around the entire island talking to people! And while most of the sidequest isn't mandatory, completing it is necessary to get an item that for most players will be needed to finish the game. In other words, Awakening really pushes you to get to know Koholint and its inhabitants, and hopefully grow to care for them and feel the weight of your main quest's consequences.
That main quest, as it turns out, is to wake the Wind Fish that slumbers in the enormous egg atop Mount Tamaranch at the north end of the world map. This requires collecting instruments from each of the eight dungeons scattered across the island...so let's talk about those dungeons.
-Part 4: Into the Labyrinth-
To reach most of them, you'll first need to explore the overworld and complete some random, often pretty strange tasks to find a key that will open the way to the dungeon. For instance, getting to Eagle's Tower requires you to bring a stone rooster to life and fly it across gaping chasms you couldn't cross with just the Hookshot. It's pretty weird.
The dungeons themselves deviate and elaborate on the structure used in ALttP in a few ways. Instead of finding a "big key" that gives you access to a "big chest" and unlocks the rest of the dungeon, more emphasis is placed on the central upgrade you find halfway through. The first leg of a dungeon typically has you wandering around, hitting lots of dead ends until you finally get your hands on the new item and suddenly the rest of the dungeon will open up for you, because now you can complete the environmental puzzles necessary to push further in. Likewise, where bosses in ALttP presented challenges mainly for you to resolve with your sword, bow or fire rod, the bosses in Awakening almost all demand that you use your shiny new upgrade as the means to defeat them, like the genie in Bottle Grotto whose bottle you need to toss at the wall with your new Power Bracelet. In some ways this creates for more gimmicky boss design, and most of them are pathetically easy compared to the genuine adversity ALttP throws at you, but it's an approach that allows each dungeon to more clearly identify with its central item. And I'm told that becomes the norm in future Zeldas!
This upgrade-driven progression also speaks to an overall shift more into the Metroidvania lane for Awakening. The fact that the game takes place in a smaller, tightly knit map full of roadblocks you'll need to use your full item kit to bypass contributes to this as well, with new shortcuts opening up as you go. And it's a good thing the overworld is pretty small compared to ALttP, because the screen size is also painfully tiny and thus so is your view of the immediate surroundings. With all the pauses for screen scrolling it has to do, it's good that the game doesn't bite off more than it can chew and for the most part avoids being too difficult to navigate (though I still got lost and turned around more times than I'd like).
And I gotta be honest here, progression in this game can get pretty wonky. Sometimes the devs lean too far into the realm of dreamlike chaos and present you with puzzles and gating that just doesn't seem to have any intuitive logic behind it. One minor example is when the game expects you to open a locked door by...throwing a pot at it. This is not set up at all and you have no reason to think this particular door is so different from every other door up to that point which is unlocked by a key or by clearing out the room's enemies. Similarly, that thing I mentioned earlier about bringing a rooster to life takes a series of steps so bizarre and illogical that I was dumbfounded when I looked it up.
That's not to say Awakening is lacking in puzzles that were a pure joy to solve, because there were some amazing "ah ha!" moments that gave me the same sense of excitement and satisfaction that Tunic so often did. That lightbulb going off is the high I was chasing when I started my quest to play every major Zelda game, and Awakening sometimes delivered. Not to spoil too much, but there's a moment in the third dungeon, Key Cavern, where you realize you can combine the effects of two upgrades to do something super cool that you'll go on doing in various places for the rest of the game. And if you have a hunger like I do for "puzzle box" dungeons that require you to interact with the environment in ways that dramatically alter it and gain the spatial awareness to navigate it intelligently, then Eagle's Tower will be the highlight of your playthrough. It's been a few days and I'm still thinking about how brilliant that dungeon was. While ALttP is by far the better game overall, its steady consistency stands in stark contrast to the highs and lows of playing Link's Awakening.
There are other evolutions to the dungeon formula, too. A big one is the change in functionality of the compass - in ALttP, all the compasses would do when you found them is mark the boss room on your dungeon map. This was pretty useless since the geography of dungeons in that game will naturally lead you in the boss' direction regardless. On the other hand, Awakening's dungeons tend to be far more labyrinthine and confounding, so this basic quality to the compass is inherently more valuable. But wait, there's more!! In Awakening, the compass now also plays a jingle when you enter a room with a hidden key, and it marks every unopened treasure chest left to find on your map! This makes the compass so much more vital to finding your way and uncovering secrets.
And the last thing about dungeons I need to point out is the addition of sidescrolling segments, with some light platforming and even cameo appearances from Mario enemies, like goombas and piranha plants. Because yeah, this game has platforming. The first dungeon upgrade is the Roc's Feather, which lets you jump in a Zelda game that isn't Zelda II, almost 25 years before Breath of the Wild! You can only imagine how giddy I was to have this item and how much fun I got out of it across my playthrough.
-Part 5: Why This Game Sucks Actually-
However, speaking of the item inventory...this is where we have to address one of Awakening's most painful flaws. Inventory management in this game is excruciating. Because it's on the Game Boy, you can only assign items to the A or B button, and every item you obtain is bound by this system. Where ALttP had picking up pots and rocks as a context sensitive A press, Awakening has you go into the menu to bind the Power Bracelet to A or B every time you wanna lift anything up. Likewise, where the Pegasus Boots were just a press and hold A to charge up in ALttP, in Awakening you have to button assign it if you wanna use it. Every single time.
What makes this worse is that every time you brush up against a liftable object without the Bracelet equipped, you get a long, slow, unskippable text box telling you that you can't lift it. This is pretty bad at the start of the game when you don't have the item, but it becomes unbearably bad later on when you already know that, god game shut up!!
What makes it somehow even worse than that is the fact that the game's overworld seems tailor made to exhaust you with constant, and I mean constant dips into the menu to switch out items. There are so, so very many obstacles to get around. Rocks you need to switch in the Bracelet for. Pits you need to switch in the Feather for. Enemies you need to switch in your sword for. Blocks that can only be broken with the Pegasus Boots. Gaps you can only cross with the Hookshot. It adds up, and while you get used to it, it makes traveling from one end of the map to the other a tedious ordeal.
Fixing this issue, above anything else, is something I feel like Link's Remakening (2019) has to offer over the original. From what I hear, all your most necessary upgrades are generally already bound to buttons on the controller and stay that way, dramatically minimizing the amount of menuing you have to do. I look forward to re-experiencing the game in this way at some point, because good gravy is it a problem in the og version.
-Epilogue: I Love it Anyway-
Despite some frustrating flaws that hold it back, though - some of which are a consequence of the hardware, some of which are just questionable choices on the part of the dev team - I would still say Link's Awakening DX is a lovely little game that showed a whole new side of Zelda and maintains its own special place in my heart. Koholint Island is a setting I can't help having fond affection for, with its wacky characters, poignant story, whimsical locales and the fascinating risks and experiments the devs took in making it. The director apparently said he felt as if they were making a "parody" of Zelda, and I can see it. Parts of this game feel like a weird romhack more than a fully polished official product. But that's part of its enduring charm, and I'm thankful for the strange, dreamy journey I got to take with Link, Marin, and all the rest. They'll stay somewhere in my memory, like a sad and silly dream that lingers after you wake.
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so imagine some kind of void entity, but anthropomorphic (in my brain it looked like deoxys from pokemon - but like ink-black with little white/glowing accents)
it sends you falling through different random scenes (think like scrolling on tiktok or something, but around you and you're not the one scrolling), and you have to choose related options in a list as fast as you can/within a time limit(?) (but there's nonsense and gibberish options so you can't just mash through, but you do that anyway because you don't know how this works yet and you're already panicking)
it takes your list, shakes it up and adds stuff without you knowing, now (maybe falling/moving through the same scenes again?) you have to add meaning/choose other related options to those in the list, which proves very hard when at least a third of the list is gibberish. you also have to avoid the options in the list the entity added, which are made to be believable (and you don't know it has added them)
of course you mess up, because how could you not? the best definition for brilliant in your list is a bowl of chips, and of course you don't remember adding your cats cuddling or a salad with carrots to the list, but you didn't even notice they were there, your brain seemed to think that these options made sense among the rest (that you chose in a rush, remember), so you ignore them.
i can't stress this enough, but you're in a constant rush and your brain is constantly filled with images corresponding to the scenes/words in your list, so it's really hard to think straight and you keep messing up, but the entity is just toying with you. after all, it made the original options in the list, and it reveals it added some options that you foolishly chose! you can't win, you could never win, not when you don't know the rules of the game you're playing your life on! you didn't even know how you could win! the entity starts laughing.
it just explodes. and you die.
and that was part of my dream last night :D
yeah. here's some added context cause the dream as a whole was hilarious. or just weird. idk.
so at the start(?) of the dream i'm at a ski resort (it's summer. wtf) with my friends and parents (or just my dad? i don't know) and well. the "ski resort" is more like a video game dungeon without enemies. think maybe like stone tower temple from majora's mask? but like icy. so with less empty space and puzzles and enemies in the middle, with lots of ice and snow and stairs and cold metal pipes for some reason and. you know. not upside down-able.
there's slides to go down that stem from the sides of the building, and stairs covered in snow inside to get to the rooms (yeah cause it's a ski resort. remember. nevermind the fact that you know. the snow and cold are inside as well as outside). think like grand staircases and rooms all around.
cue encounters with a bunch of my friends about 'oh wow you're here too! who else is here? been enjoying it so far?' etc etc. and a race against the clock that looks suspiciously like the goron race in majora's mask (though that might've been in another dream, idk). and also an incident with one of the metal pipes that run along the walls but whatever. that's not the focus of the dream.
my room is at the end of a staircase, my dad's room right next to it, at the end of a corridor on one side is a series of smaller stairs that lead to a friend's room. said friend is kind of a nerd (read: completely obsessed with videogames, but i am too so uh. pot meet kettle), dad is too, though a different flavour of nerd (tabletop games, he plays bloodbowl which is like fantasy american football with lots of violence, very fun) so we go over to his room to play videogames cause fun so why not!
turns out his room is an actual boss battle arena. we are already inside a videogame. his room has a boss battle that gets rerolled each time you retry (read: die and come back). first boss rolled is a queen gibdo knock-off (yes i have been playing too much totk don't judge) but like. metal and snow instead of bug and sand yk. we die. we wake up in our rooms. rush to my friend's room to see if he's ok cause yk. his room is the boss arena. we get there, boss activates, same boss gets rolled, i think we win this time? idk
then we decided to roll the boss a third time. for funsies. the symbol on the wall that indicates which boss is being rolled turns ink-black and shows a sparkle design. i hear my friend mutter curses ('worst fucking boss') under his breath
boss appears. see first part of the story for the rest of the 'boss battle'. my dad and my friend are actually here too i'm just too focused on panicking to notice them yk.
that explosion from the boss that kills us at the end? it looks like a time bomb from totk. i promise i'm not insane about this game.
also right after the explosion i promptly wake up (at 7am. I wanted to sleep in :( but oh well) to write everything down cause yeah. weird-ass dream but i wanna remember it so yeah
tl;dr: my dream last night was some kind of boss fight against an entity that looked like deoxys but in black colours and that killed me for not noticing everything :D
#my brain is very normal#also? this dream was like a one-off thing but uh. sometimes my brain creates dreams that are sequels of dreams i had when i was like 8. oop#so yeah this turned out a bit longer than i expected but hey that's what i get for trying to explain the chaos that is my brain#this took me 2hrs to make btw it's 9am for me now#scarlet rambling#scarlet original post™
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