I played both and found Botw boring. Huge areas were nothing was happening, but they looked nice. Except the divine beasts, they were boring as hell, gameplay wise and optical. For this they got rid of cool dungeons? The challenge shrines repeated often and were not really interesting at all. And the weapons broke permanently. After a short while I simply rushed through this game. I can see the love poured into this game but the gameplay was just soon boring to me.
Then came Totk. I was sceptical at first, but then came the building of stuff. Suddenly it was okay when weapons broke, because you could try other interesting things with them. Dungeons were back. The challenge shrine were mostly puzzles for the build mechanic. The whole freaking world was filled with build puzzles where I could get lost in shenanigans. So they basically addressed most issues I had with the first game and as a result I liked it more.
Storywise I would place them both in the category “about okay”.
This meshes pretty well with my feelings of thing. On the whole, TotK is more refined more of the same. I’ve enjoyed seeing how the world and characters have moved on, I enjoyed the side quests, and I enjoyed that feeling early on of the depths being new, mysterious, and dangerous.
One of the things I decided early on was that I didn’t like the Lego Technic stuff, and I committed to using it as little as possible. Especially for speeding up travel. I’m an old, and my internal Hyrule is deeply and strictly… medieval? Mythical? Legendary? Electric drones just don’t fit into my schema for Zelda, even though the developers gave been slipping more and more magitech into the setting for going on 20 years now. I feel that this has given me more of a sense of the game as a meal, to use your analogy, but it’s definitely an indulgent one.
I wasn’t looking for more BotW. I was just looking for more Link, Zelda, and Ganon. I got what I wanted, and I genuinely don’t understand the ire the game has drawn, other than, maybe, a lot of people getting what they wanted, discovering they were wrong about what they wanted, and being unwilling to accept that.
Just really don’t like building mechanics in games. Or crafting.
High five brother.
Even with that I am about to finish BOTW, I am not too excited about TOTK though.
To be honest even when BOTW has crafting mechanics I barely use them… I don’t cook anything unless a mission requires it, the same for the weapons I don’t craft them, I just pick up whatever, it is not like they last too much.
I dropped BotW because of the weird Beast missions, for which I had to use an online guide to beat. I didn’t think the puzzles in them were well-designed at all.
TotK was the first Zelda I actually played to the end credits. It wasn’t perfect, but it was much more fun and better designed—aside from the depths and caves, which were way too monotonous.
But I do get the point about differing atmospheres. I loved what BotW offered, while TotK is at best an echo of it.
I personally found the new Zelda games to be empty feeling, characters felt bland. Overly annoying combat system where you weapons are constantly breaking, puzzles were ok. Just felt like a massive chore to even like this game. I’d much rather play link to be past again then this new stuff but that’s my opinion.
Breath of the Wild: Beautiful. Mysterious. Inspired.
Tears of the Kingdom. Big. Shallow. Boring.
I found the first dozen or two hours of TotK exciting, as I encountered new mechanics and a darker side of Hyrule. But it wasn’t long before the new and exciting became endless expanses of copy/paste encounters and terrain, forgettable characters, and annoying enemies. Nothing felt clever or interesting. I lost interest in exploring, and wandered away from the game.
Then I went back to the first game for another run.
Definitely agree! I barely played TotK because, aside from the flying stuff together aspect, I’d already done everything I wanted in BotW. I did my exploring, my climbing, my juggling weapons during combat. I’ve done had more than my fill of those dinkly little shrines.
BotW is better imo because of what it was: new and surprising. TotK was good but (aside from some gimmicks that made driving around a bit more creative and streamlined) more of the same.
This is very interesting to me because I wanted to keep going after BoTW ended. ToTK is like a full game sized DLC with all new gameplay elements, so it was exactly what I wanted. It’s kind of like an indulgent victory lap showing off all the cool stuff the engine can do with some new tools to play with. I will say that this is enough for me. Really hoping they do something completely original again.
I didn’t care much for botw. I still cleared it and had fun. It’s just the item durability system frustrated me. Everything felt cheap and not rewarding as a result.
durability systems in non crafting games suck all of the joy out for me. I get weirdly anxious about “optimizing” my weapons and end up only using bad weapons and making the game needlessly hard on myself.
I almost did the same with my Black Flag playthrough. What I ended up doing was using the Steam Notes to save my Ubisoft password and copy and paste it in. Ik it’s horrible for security, but I was fed up with having to get my phone out and look at my keychain just to type out the long password
acknowledge that one singular woman is currently better than you at this one particular skill or draw 20
man it’s like there are options that don’t involve aggression towards another person for… not being bad at a video game
I count myself lucky the men I know in real life are chill, and that I am not too interested in PvP games, scared off by the constant reinforcement from stories online that someone will be shitty to me because I am a woman. When I did play TF2 it was always pubs mic off and with a very gender-neutral username.
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