They're so easy to get as you go, it's blatantly obvious where they are so I just get them as I wander, I did like one spot where I just got like 4 in a row. I love when I see a vary obviously placed rock on a peak or island and it's a korok, I feel smart even though it's mundane and irrelevant 😂
I don't consider myself to be in either category. I do what i feel like doing in the moment. I admit to being a collector. However, I really enjoy finding those little buggers. The yeah ha ha makes me happy. Every time. I even converted my 7 year old niece and nephew. They will request to play the "Link" game and ask me to find a little man. They will then procede to jump around shouting yeah ha ha. It makes us all happy. Their 3 year old brother enjoys it when a rock gets dropped on the korok. I admit to dropping rocks quite often. I also admit to launching a few into the distance in the opposite direction from their lost friends. I just really enjoy finding koroks. 😊
Because of how abundant they are in the game, I find them literally everywhere while exploring. And I never feel like I have to go out and look for them actively. Ans that keeps the came enjoyable for me.
Personally I felt like, when it came to tears of the kingdom, koroks were too large a part of the exploration and discovery of the world because you're already so familiar with this version of Hyrule that there's not much else new to see, and I don't think that's a role korok puzzles can adequately fulfill. It feels like a lot of the approach to the recent games has been to load them up with a bunch of small filler things to do rather than larger undertakings like dungeons or mini-dungeons as before. It's clear this is done deliberately to make the game's content more approachable but it results in a lack of things that feel satisfying to accomplish. Another problem I think people haven't really talked about is that the korok + shrine + side-quest structure has made the rewards for a given task too predictable, removing any fun element of surprise. When you see a korok puzzle, you know you will get a korok seed. When you see a shrine, you know it will give you a spirit orb. A side-quest or chest will probably give you a material, rupees, or a disposable piece of equipment. This makes rewards much less interesting, and you will never be surprised to receive something that meaningfully improves your quality of life in the game.
Thank you for making this video. As a recovering completionist, I take comfort in learning you don't get rewarded past collecting less than half of these elusive seeds. One more reason to give breath of the wild a second chance.
I will never understand people wanting to go back to linearity. That would just massively devolve the natural progression games should have. There are countless of linear games from several decades for you to play if you're somehow allergic to open world style. No, it's here to stay and I for one am glad that games are granting freedom gameplay. Linearity is so past.
I just play naturally, I consider my a thoroughist, I tried bein a completionist enough times to realize that it lowers the enjoyment of games, for me at least.
Tbh BOTW was a resounding success that demolishes every one of the games these individuals prefer in terms of sales, attention, marketability and being overall unit shifters for the consoles as a whole. What Aonuma needs to do is ignore minority opinions from people who tell him BOTW sucked when it was clearly by majority decision the best Zelda game ever released. Sales figures speak for themselves. If success is what you seek, you need to make exactly ZERO changes to accommodate individuals whose play experience for whatever reason simply has nothing in common with 99% of the customer base, their opinions are utterly irrelevant, you can't appease everyone but you must appease the majority and again the majority says BOTW was amazing, the best Zelda of all time and Game of the Year
To be honest, I really just wish that the korok rewards weren't so exponential (weapons/bow/shield slots). I really want to be able to have more weapons or shields on hand (even just to have the joy of collecting them) but before very long, it takes TWENTY FIVE koroks for a new slot? And then some? I don't know, it just got really disheartening after awhile to see how many I'd successfully discovered only to realize I wasn't even halfway to getting a new slot.
As soon as you can get to a sky island and collect 10 sundelions, go directly to Tarrytown and do the little quest to send the kid to Gerudo, that's what the sundelions are for. Once done, go buy 3 shield stands, three weapon stands and 3 bow stands. You don't need any of the other useless building items. Now, you can store all your weapons here and keep a couple of each on hand. YOU can double them up by fusing them, Bows can be fused to shields but otherwise you can fuse weapon-weapon, weapon-shield, etc. when you want those weapons just skip over to Tarrytown get the little goron dude to unfuse them. The bottom line is that using this method you can store 18 of each of your shields, bows, and weapons> How many KOroks would it take to get 18 slots for each weapon and how much mindless searching would it take? Once you have your little 'home' you don't need the Koroks, that's the only thing they are useful for.
While I’m pro-korok, I have a legitimate complaint, I think: the leaf mask. You can chalk it up to FOMO, sure, but given that there are koroks *waves hands* around, I feel pressure to always have the mask on during my explorations. The satisfaction of finding a korok > the fun of using the other masks. Which is lame, because it meant I spent 90% of both BOTW and TOTK wearing it, and not experimenting with other toys. My ideal scenario, I think, would be for Hestu to give a passive korok locator tool, or to be able to tag koroks in your item radar thing, after you find, say, 50% of them through regular means. Then the game would essentially be saying, “OK, yep, we see you, you put in the effort. Here, explore widely from now on, but don’t worry about missing anyone while you’re using the Zora helm etc.”
I would normally consider myself a completionist, but when it comes to the innumerable Koroks, I doubt I'll come close to finding them all in this vast world. The ones I have encountered have usually been by chance... a suspicious ring of stones, an incomplete structure, a hole to push a boulder into, that sort of thing... 😆 I'm certainly more concerned with trying to tick off sidequests and complete my compendium from all the news weapons and things I keep finding!
Always encouraging to see someone offering a positive, respectful view of something they feel is underappreciated - really well explained. Something to consider though is that this defense might be overlooking a third category: the casual player - someone who isn't rushing through the game, but isn't going out of their way to find Korok seeds either. For us, it's not that Korok's aren't a fun addition to the world, but rather that they frequently take the place of a more rewarding discovery. As you spend seeds to expand your inventory, they become less and less valuable. Yet as you say, they're so numerous that they don't seem to become any less common. And when considering that they require far more time and effort than opening a simple chest which also tends to have a far more valuable reward, then it becomes disappointing to keep exploring only to find something that you've seen a dozens of times before and no longer have a use for - even if you don't bother to collect it. If nothing else, removing the cutscene that plays after every Korok puzzle would make it so much smoother for FOMO, completionist and casual players alike to incorporate Korok's into their respective gameplay flows without dominating it so much.
Ima FOMO 🤣🤣🤣 restarted the game like 50 times just to get the best experience and best way of going about things and I’m STILL restarting botw to this DAY😅 I JUST GOT WOLF LINK so I got to restart and play though with him at my side 🤷♂️ I completed the game with getting the master sword first just to see the difference in dialog when you go save the beasts 😅 and of course waited to the very end to get it in another play through that’s how bad it is man but I love the game I guess it’s because it’s the SECOND ever Zelda game I played the first was the first Zelda game you know that “it’s dangerous to go alone” one 😅
Nintendo did say that they didnt want to spend anymore time with this iteration of Hyrule so I think the Wild era is over. Unless they are in a new continent on a third game.
I only care about opening up my whole weapon/bow/shield inventory and that’s it I’m done with the koroks after that unless I see one on the way and feeling like doing it 😂
Each person enjoys different things about zelda, I enjoy 100 percenting zeldas, but not other games, aside from 1 or 2 here or there. Usually, unless there are missable items in a game, i play through the game normally first to experience the story, Then i go back and do everything else post game for the 100 percent. If there are missables in the game i get them as soon as they become available but then go back to playing normally. Im actually currently doing a 100 zelda challenge for every mainline game that's on switch counting NSO games, but not counting spinoffs, and have done botw already, it takes about 200 hours to 100 using an online interactive map as a checklist.
I genuinely enjoy the “I need to find my friend” koroks! I always stop what I’m doing when I hear their little call. They are fun and sometimes surprisingly challenging. Not a fan of the dandelions, so I don’t do those.
But the korok puzzles arent really puzzles? And they aren’t ever very interesting or new. I suspect for a lot of people is they just don’t notice koroks, and then by the point they DO need koroks, its because they’ve ran out of inventory and are tired of not having enough slots. Then they find out how EXPENSIVE it is, so people end up doing a bunch of korok puzzles at once to “get it over with”. Heres a couple of ideas I came up with: 1. Scrap Bubblefrogs and replace them with korok creatures. Players already explore caves, and using those would increase players inventory over time as they explore the map. 2. Give the player a 3rd way of getting korok seeds. Maybe there are evil koroks in the depths, that drop seeds once destroyed 3. Just reduce the cost of upgrading your inventory. Add in some super koroks that give you 5x at a time and you find them chilling in the world, wandering
I think a smaller but more core problem lies under the Korok Seed problem, these two games have super rigid reward structures. Tears is a little looser, but BotW you only get Spirit Orbs from Shrines (some armor is in chests in them yes, but then most of those are just blessing shrines so not really a shrine) you only get Korok Seeds from these puzzles, you only get weapons from specific places etc. For most things in the game that works because it lets you map the game out despite how big it is, but with Koroks being useless after getting half of them it gets annoying seeing them. Even if you enjoy doing the puzzles, getting nothing, and almost worse than nothing, for continuing to do them feels bad. I think a small fix could have been to have them spawn a handful of resources and/or rupees after you got the last one needed for Inventory upgrades, or maybe have them do that for every one of em. Granted resources too become useless rewards [that far into the game] but still better than something telling you you shouldn't have kept going.
While I do agree the seeds are mot really intended to be all collected, you ate wrong about the game not giving an indication. When you compete the game, on your map screen, the game will display a % complete, and that factors in korok seeds found. This is much different than say, Legends Arceus where the endgame literally instructs you to catch all Pokémon. I feel that is reasonable attainable. The Koroks are bad because you basically need a master map to compare to, and of you miss one, the odds of being able to narrow it down are near non-existent.
Well said. There are many pitfalls in designing open-world games, and I think BotW/TotK do better than most. But one trouble, for players or devs, is seeing an open-world game as a huge, enormous linear game. For better or for worse, an open-world game should be one where ten people can play the same game and have eleven different experiences.
While there is no specific counter for the koroks like we have for the hyrule compendium, on loading screens(ex. when fast travelling) there is a number that displays how many koroks youve collected. Just something im not sure if you implied it or not in the video.
Koroks are just a side distraction, for me if I see a korok puzzle that's easy I give it a shot. If it's too dificult for a casual playthrough or it takes me too far off the path I'm going I just mark it with a leaf on the map and maybe get back to it later.. 🙂
I did like 3 100% runs of BoTW (2 in MM), I never cared about getting stool for a reward, I cared about being able to 100% a game I loved to the core... so for me the reward was pointless... I did it because I could and I was proud of it...
Aside from the inventory upgrades which makes finding Korok seeds worth it, other than this I tend not to spend most of my time looking for them. The reason is is that in my mind with a storyline with a plot is grave as what you find in tears of the Kingdom I kind of feel like I don't have time to look for Korok seeds let alone help a Korok find its partner when there are other more pressing matters to deal with. But that's just me.
Im not really into the toy like style for Zelda. It was fine with link hardly noticeable in Links Awakening. But I do not like this as a modern look. I'd take a link between worlds style over this any day. Also, I'm skeptical about this game, very skeptical. Considering breath of the wild was a dumpster fire and tears of the Kingdom was just a decent improvement from breath of the wild.
I’m at 650 and my brain just can’t even fathom that there are still 350 left. I’ve been everywhereeeeeeeee. I’m still looking forward to finding the rest though!
This would be true if it wasn't for the total completionist percentage you get when finishing the game. Sadly, you must collect every koroks for it to show 100%, and this kills completionists.
"A pretty vocal group" that's a loud vocal minority and nothing more, I love how RU-vid channels with no subscribers always try and bait with odd comments in their videos like that
I agree that the idea is more just to have a lot of them all over the place so players can find a good amount no matter what they do, the problem is there will always be people who want to find all of a thing if there's a finite number of something and the fact that they contribute to the map completion percentage encourages said people even more. As someone who did "100% complete" a lot of Zelda games before, it is kind of strange to think I may never do that for Tears of the Kingdom because I do think it's my new favorite in the series, but at the end of the day I guess that dissonance doesn't really mean anything. In the future I guess there's even more they could do to discourage players from feeling like they should find all of them, like having the puzzles tied to a currency like the Secret Seashells in some of the handheld titles which are simply replaced with rupees once you've found enough to acquire all the rewards. In Ocarina of Time and Majora's Mask they also had little puzzles in the overworld but they just produced fairies or rupees so people probably didn't feel like they were obligated to find and do all of them. I do think something like the shrines or bubbul gems are a more manageable collectible to try and go after, and probably part of the problem with the Koroks is also the fact that they truly can be anywhere with very little sense of if you've found them all in an area or not unless you use a guide. This was much worse in Breath of the Wild where they didn't even have those little arrows pointing to them so they could technically be at the top of any tree. Exploring the entire map is fun, but feeling like you have to climb every hill and tree individually just to check if they have something to "100% complete" the game is less so for a lot of people, even if it's really a self-imposed challenge. Ultimately I love the open air Zeldas and I don't really agree with many of the criticisms, even the ones I do agree with I think are overly magnified more than they deserve to be by those who don't like them. But perhaps there are more ways they can encourage players to not be so worried about completing everything 100%. I also see people complain about "grinding", but you don't really need to do that either unless you want four stars on every single armor set, which really isn't necessary and if anything probably makes the game too easy. The game encourages that even less than it does finding all the Koroks, so I guess there will always be people who feel like they have to do every single thing, but there are still more ways to discourage it. Maybe they could do what Rockstar sometimes does, like in Red Dead Redemption 1 and 2, and have a 100 percent checklist that isn't actually 100 percent, so players can feel like they fully completed the game and got the reward for it without actually combing the entire map.
