While I disagree with the overall sentiment of your review, two parts baffle me:
1. Why is so much of the review hidden behind spoiler tags? It's generally expected that a review will include spoilers in their critique, so there's no need to hide them since anyone who opts to read it is already aware of that (or should be).
2. The sky isn't barren. There's multiple shrines scattered across the Sky Islands, the Wind and Water Temples are also in the sky, there's multiple overworld bosses to battle like King Gleeoks, and there's mini-game challenges. That's a whole of activity and discovery you'd have to disregard to claim it's devoid of any meaningful content.
I'd make a similar argument for the underground as well, though obviously YMMV.
I wouldn't mind failure so much, if I didn't fail so much.
1. Because the game is still quite recent, and I myself prefer to go with as little information as possible, so I chose to hide the info in case someone likeminded shows up. (It costs nothing to just add the spoiler tags).
2. I agree that its YMMV territory, but to me, the sky is barren because, while there are the shrines and and the two temples (two temples for the underground, two for the sky and one for the land) alongside some challenges as you said, the brunt of content is still on the land. The npcs, the biggest fights, the vast majority of koroks, villages, most of the foes, Hyrule castle, caves, etc are on the main land. One could argue that you could balance things out by sharing content (i.e placing the Hyrule castle in the sky, placing one of the villages in the underground) but then it would be at the risk of making Hyrule level scant as well.
Because, at the end of the day, you need content to fill such large maps, which means fleshing out background and investing in storytelling, which Nintendo won\'t ever do.
For example, you could make whole villages of Zonai (even if ghosts, or ghosts in constructs) in the sky and offer the change of getting more in-depth info (the stone tablets you find roughly just tell the same story you already saw on the tears) and learning more about the past in ways that weren\'t just repetition. There are \'hints\' linking Zonaite and corruption (since most corrupted monsters drop zonaite, zonaite can only be mined in the underground, etc) which could be explored in the underground, perhaps telling the story of a civilization that fell because they got too arrogant and thought they could just purify the obviously corrupt stuff. Or you could find buried cities that tell the story of the champions of old instead of just relegating them to parrots that tell the same cutscene.
I get what you're saying, regarding point 1 (many game reviews aim to be spoiler free these days), so fair enough I suppose.
The content distribution between the land, sky, and underground maps, while admittedly uneven, felt balanced and seemed narratively sound. The Zonai are long extinct by Hyrule's present day, so I wasn't expecting to find a lost city, or any towns among the sky islands. Instead we found scattered traces of their existence in the form of the sentry constructs, ancient tablets, and artifacts. In much the same way that there aren't any thriving Chozo settlements during Samus' time in the Metroid series.
Not true. BotW had a deep imaginative story, despite all the claims that it was devoid of any simply because they were hidden. Yet, a YouTuber named Zeltik was the first to discover the lore pertaining to the Zonai civilization and was posting videos about them well over a year before Nintendo officially confirmed their existence in The Hyrule Historia. Which was also years before Tears of the Kingdom was said to be in development.
So yes, the story was definitely there. It's just that most people either choose to skip it, or they didn't search hard enough. Tears is no different: the strory is there to be discovered, assuming the player is willing to invest the time and effort to search the scattered ruins, memories (i.e. the geoglyphs), and texts to piece it together.
I'll also add the Xenoblade series (co-owned by Nintendo and Monolith Soft) as further proof that Nintendo has invested in storytelling, because it's one of Xenoblade's main selling points.
I'm not so sure about that. The Zonaite itself isn't corrupt, rather it was Ganondorf who corrupted it with his "gloom". Just as the Guardians weren't evil until Calamity Ganon corrupted them with its "malice". But once Link defeats them, the Guardians and Zonaite are cleansed of the malice/gloom and restored to their unblemished form.
I wouldn't mind failure so much, if I didn't fail so much.
Lets just agree to disagree. I think that there could be a lot more content to be explored instead of just hints and pieces scattered about, with more people to talk to, more wondrous locations to be explored, more to be told in a more clear and direct way, and you think its enough. That\'s fine by itself.
Leave a Comment:
Big shoes for tiny feet.
While I did overall enjoy the game, I think that my review will be brief, due to much of my impressions already being exposed in a better way in other reviews. But I feel that there was a lush, big world that was barely explored due to the limitations of its storytelling style.
One of the biggest impressions that I had when playing this Tot K was that little thought was given to how to balance each new element brought to the fray, to the point where it becomes weirdly frustrating. The Zonai devices were already mentioned in another review, but you also have new clothes! Either they are extremely situational (elemental attacks in weathers where monsters will be resistant to said element, without giving weather resistance), or downright useless, worse, requiring you to go through gauntlets to find pieces that end up redundant (going through three mazes just to look like Ganondorf, in a suit that I can't upgrade? No thanks). And thanks to the new progression system, where monsters 'upgrade' based on how many you killed instead of temples completed, upgrading your stuff became an unbearable chore. Didn't find the Hylian Armor in time? Good luck finding fifteen blue bokoblin bosses, better go to a reddit thread and sleep till the blood moon shows up. Fifteen? Yes, because requirements were cranked up, and now up to three different suits use the same resources. You'd need FORTY ONE hinox guts for four different sets. That's a lot of dead ogres. And asides from Lynels, not even the last boss offers a challenge worthy of grinding so much. Why not ease the burden? Give me a suit that enables me to get bugs without crouching!
You have two new whole maps to explore! Hurray! Except that the underground is nearly completely devoid of anything meaningful besides treasure chests, zonaite and two temples. We are speaking about a map the size of Hyrule. And the sky is nearly just as barren. You can't bind items from a menu, needing to repeatedly drop them on the floor and manually bind them to a weapon, and to toss an item, you need to try to toss your sword, even if you can bring said item up from a menu. Its the little things that start grinding the more you play.
But most of all, I think that the biggest waste was that it was a linear repeated story for a non-linear structure that invited something new. I can't fully blame myself for being disappointed because the game actually sets up as if something new and more interesting was going to happen: Oh hey, a new species! they are dead. New heroes from the past! they are dead and failed to stop a guy that falls like a chump if you so much upgrade half of your arsenal Ganondorf is shown scheming instead of just brute-forcing! What will he do? Oh he just stabs the queen instead of seducing her, or using Rauru's arrogance or anything else.
It nearly feels like a meme: "We've had one, yes. What about a second apocalyptic event where heroes of old were defeated and now Link has to clean up everyone's mess to save a Zelda that had to wait for untold aeons?" And since characterization and storytelling are minimal, everything feels wasted and repetition hurts more, the sages interact with you two or three times before learning their lessons and pledging their help and have a repeated cutscene that tells the same story instead of fleshing out the champions of the past. All because the writers didn't know how to deal with a linear narrative in an open game and shift the tone and pieces for a change. You can't have your cake and eat it.
And could have been controlled with just some tweaks, like only enabling Link to find the tears and learn Zelda's fate, after you killed Fake Zelda. In Breath of the Wild, each memory was self-contained in a way they were pieces of a larger puzzle, here, I accidentally found one of the last tears first and got spoiled to Rauru mourning his dead queen. What pisses me off most is that both photography, soundtrack and directing improved in LEAPS. The final fight is easy, but its downright gorgeous, with really good music and a touching directing. Why not shake things down a bit? Let there be more characterization and more moments in this enormous game. Let Rauru actually kill a more cunning Ganondorf who couldn't beat the king through assassination or brute force let Zelda remain a dragon to give a sense of gravitas and sacrifice and link either keep the zonai arm or lose his. Yeah, right, as if they'd do it. But at least let them kiss, dammit! Is nintendo such a prude that they couldn't show that Rauru and Sonia had a kid, nor let Link get the girl at the end!?
Again, while this review sounds like pure vitriol, I really enjoyed the game, I'm just pointing out that this is far from Game of the Year material, since its a huge, huge game, for a tiny twig of a story.