Tears of the Kingdom Critique - A Legendary Disappointment 

48 of the 152 shrines are Rauru's Blessing treasure chest shrines. About one third of all total shrines are blatant padding that you access by dragging a crystal from point A to point B.

Mans about to get crucified 💀

it's even worse when you remember what nintendo managed to do with recycled Ocarina bits in 2 years and they waaay overestimated my enthusiasm for transporting koroks

The only thing here I disagress with is that totk has a better story than botw. This is not at all true because of at least in botw, getting one memory before the others doesn't spoil the entire thing. As well as this the fact that they turn Zelda back into hylian after being a dragon contradicts what the entire story had set up about "there is no way to return" and removes any kind of emotional impact Zelda's transformation originally had.

why didn’t they just have us time travel 10k years like you said that would’ve been amazing

As an average totk enjoyer, I surprisingly do agree with most of your points and get where you’re coming from with them. While I don't find the game outright terrible, hearing your thoughts have opened my mind to things I haven't realized are true, such as the small amount of innovation outside of the new abilities.

6 years for this is such a disappointment. It’s just BOTW 1.5. Majora’s Mask did so much more as a sequel in a fraction of the time

Honestly, I’m not totally sure who this game is for anymore. It’s not people who like puzzles because shrines/dungeons are either brain dead easy or built to be cheesed. It’s not combat because there is like no weapon and enemy variety and combat is only leant any kind of depth from pro-level glitching and system manipulation. It’s not the story because it’s not only cartoonishly acted and written but also ruined by the completely open air approach. It’s not for exploration because exploration yields no exciting rewards since the game’s progression is stripped down by design. It’s not quests since quests are as unrewarding as exploration and as uninterestingly written as the story. I guess it’s entirely for builders most of all at this point. Breaking the game is simply the point now.

Some reviews said that Tears of the Kingdom made breath of feel like a prototype, but honestly I think Tears feels far more like a prototype than Breath of the Wild did. Breath of the Wilds main draw was the feeling of exploration, having limitations on how you travel is what made it feel like an epic adventure. Tears on the other hand adds in all these traversal options to by pass exploration..... on a map designed for exploration......... The mechanic is undoubtedly incredibly, but it feels like it's in the totally wrong game. Had Tears been set on a different Hyrule, with far better combat, far greater enemy variety, smarter armour upgrade system (you didn't mention it in the review and my god it was terrible in Breath and still terrible now) and a far more involved story, then Breath would have felt like a prototype. Tears feels like it's a prototype for the ultra hand concept stapled onto Breath of the Wild. It's an incredible mechanic, incredibly designed, that never should have been a part of the Breath of the Wild franchise. I honestly can't see it return in a Zelda game again unless it's extremely limited.

I swear nintendo could make a a totk sequel where they take google maps data, replicate the earth and place random camps everywhere and people would say it's a masterpiece because of how much content it has. 10,000 korok seeds!

When you mentioned the Water Temple and ascending into the fire room… I didn’t do that. I just had Sidon protect me with water and walked right through. Then you put a platform on the switch and it turns the fire off.

what dissapointed me was after couple of hours and doing the first story dungeon I knew what the rest of the game would look like and from then I lost motivation to even finish the game

IMHO the devs spent a copious amount of time getting ultra hand to work. Which to their credit does work incredibly well for a game like this. The problem is that ultra hand runs counterintuitive to nearly everything else about the game. As a traversal mechanic it's either too tedious to design unique vehicles or it breaks exploration with things like 2 fans and a steering wheel. As a combat mechanic aside from fusing it's far to impractical. In the time it takes someone to build a Bokoblin smashing Mecha Godzilla contraption (as impressive as it may be) that could clear out a fort when set loose. I could clear out 4 forts + a couple encampments with a couple sticks with horns attached to them in the same amount of time. So little effort was put into any other aspect of TOTK. The story is more grandiose, but it's paper thin, disorganized, and can't even follow it's own continuity from the game it's a sequel to. Combat pacing and enemy variety is still practically non existent. Dungeons are a slight improvement over BOTW, but still some of the worst in all of Zelda's history. And all the new areas are embarrassingly repetitive and loose they're charm after a couple hours. The Legend of Zelda is my favorite franchise and i welcomed a lot of changes BOTW brought to exploring the overworld. TOTK was an opportunity to reincorporate more of the fun elements like dungeons, real time story, enemy variety, and more from traditional Zelda titles into the new open air formula introduced by BOTW. What we wound up getting was the worst of both worlds. A game that continues to disregard the core elements of what makes a zelda game feel like a zelda game, and exploring area's that have either already been tread upon, or loose they're charm almost instantly.

My only real criticism of the game is that the sky should have been more densely populated with locations that actually had lore. I wanted to see Zonai temples and hell maybe even a couple of town ruins I would have much rather each región have its own large sky island that had narrative significance rather than the Tiny challenge islands we got. The depths were super cool in my opinion and I rather liked them although I wish each section had its own specific enemies.

I give this review a 10/10

I miss when Zelda was more than a Minecraft reskin slapped onto a generic open world.

If I had seen this video when it came out, I would’ve thought you were being uncharitable and vitriolic. Now, 6 months after the game’s release and after I myself have dunked ~200 hrs into the game, I think your criticisms are mostly correct. Consider my rose-colored glasses removed. Nintendo had a lot to deliver, and while I think they added new features that are both desirable and fun for awhile, I ultimately agree that they dropped the ball with totk. They had 6 years to do it right, but instead they chose quantity > quality and gave us a game where we invent our own fun (which is a design choice that makes for a good minecraft game, maybe, but makes for a bad Zelda game imo).

Yeah, saw the fusion/ultrahand showcase in the trailer and immediately thought: “Oh no, I bet they poured all of their resources into fusion and not into enemy variety, weapon variety, dungeons, combat changes, or good and plentiful side quests…”

I thought ToTK was quite boring. Hate the building aspect and preferred the abilities from BoTW. Depths were also very repetitive and boring.

One thing I like about this game has been the reception by fans. While critics have given their bizarre perfect scores, a lot more of the fans have been reacting to the flaws compared to the release of BotW. I remember searching for videos critical of BotW and there were very few of them early on, yet for TotK there are already a lot more just a few months after release. Even casual fans I've spoken to online have mentioned that it dramatically failed to capture them the way BotW did and they lost interest usually within a week or two. I hope this reaction will cause Nintendo to rethink and change course to get back to making good games.

Should have been a dlc honestly

I'm a 90s baby and played Zelda games since a link to the past. I found both botw and totk disappointing for lacking the ability to draw me into the game past exploration alone. I enjoy exploring new places but can get distracted them to the point I'm disconnected from the story which is why i play Zelda games. I absolutely hated that the majority of story in both games where pushed over to memory cutscenes. I miss the draw from Zelda games like Ocarina of time, twilight princess and windwaker that make me want to see what's next. Discovery is fun but once you discover everything what makes you want to replay and rediscover it if theres no good storyline to make it worth going back?

Don't remember going under the Water Temple. Just used Sidon's water shield to get through the fire barrier.

Not so good at putting it to words as you, but I have developed a growing disappointment going from botw to tears, much for the reasons you mention. I also think I'm permanently cured when it comes to breaking weapons .. sharpening and improving is ok, but ... so I returned to the witcher III again. Thank you for this video.

"It's not the size that matters, but how you use it" wise words

Not something you touched on, but one thing that really annoyed me with this game was how little it respected the player when it came to the real core of this style of game, which is exploring the world. You find one great fairy, she marks on your map where all the others are. You start exploring the depths, you can pay the statue in Lookout Landing poes for him to tell you where all the bargainer statues are. You first start the game, and someone marks off on your map where all the great sages are. I get that in the era we've been in for decades now where someone could go look all this up online that they need to adjust how they approach exploring, but the fact they removed the option to explore for myself and find things on my own from the game was really so disappointing. To me Breath of the Wild was a game about exploring, and Tears of the Kingdom took all that away. They made exploring the new zones tedious, and they just kind of told you where so many of the games' secrets are

Something went seriously wrong in development. You can tell the devs didn’t enjoy making this game. It’s why they’re not making dlc despite the amount in sales it would make.

I can't stop thinking about how many possible ways there would be to make this game better. This really was the worst possible outcome that I feared it would be when they announced it'd use the same map.

Am i the only person that misses zelda music in zelda games? I never hear anything about it in reviews. I feel like a crazy person.

Honestly, it’s shocking how Elden Ring made the ENTIRE game feel fresh and exciting to explore. Ik people defend the weapon durability system by saying it would incentivize exploration or use of different weapons. Then we have Elden Ring, which lets you invest in any weapon, with the ability to customize it with effects on hit and the skills. Enemies dropping armor sets/weapons/crafting materials also are a boon. There’s a mountain of stuff to find WITHOUT a durability system at all. Same thing can be said about Bloodborne too.

How hard could it have been to make something like “flurry rush arts” where you get different TYPES of attacks to do after flurry rushing. Like age of calamity. Some that explode, some that do electric damage, some that put link the air. Instead of just mashing y over and over and over again. They had SIX YEARS.

i guarantee you that 90% of the negative comments were from people who said to themselves: "well, i had fun!" ... and thats how far the majority of the human race has come in critical thinking

I still can't believe this game took six years to make with an existing engine while Praey to the gods which was made from ground by three people is better in almost every aspect even though Zelda is one of the biggest video game franchises if not the biggest... Praey to the gods has a hookshot, better survival system, better atmosphere, better exploring, better graphics, better bosses, better music, better story and better rewarding and cost me like 15€?... and don't get me startet on Star Wars Fallen Order which is a cineastic spectacle with hardly any weaknesses and which cost me 6€... absolutely embarassing for Nintendo... The good reviews come from fake metacritic scores and deletion of bad reviews, youtubers struggling with being negative and toxic fans insulting and threatening critics like they did on facebook with the only 60% reviewer...

I really enjoyed early game shrines because they were out in the open so you had to do a puzzle in the shrine. Once those are done and you're doing cave and sky shrines, they almost exclusively are crystal challenges or just reward you with a blessing for finding it, no puzzle required.

I like this game, but this brought up many valid points. My only real issue for this game would be that the story questline is a bit short and ganondorf isn't very involved in any of them. Feels like there could have been a lot more they could have done, but I still like the game overall. 👍

"Imagine if Elden Ring did this" is a great summation of my feelings about TOTK.

I think TotK would be better if the whole game only took place in either the sky islands or the depths. Creating an entirely new map with new races so it just doesn't seem like BotW2.

I feel like the ai for the 5 sages suck. Whenever I want to use their powers I try to run up to any of them but they keep running away from me. As much as I love the new abilities, I kind of miss the ones botw had like revalis gale or miphas grace because I could use them whenever I wanted instead of running up to a ai and clicking on them.

I honestly don't understand how so many people acted like it's 10/10. On my very first playthrough, heck from the moment I started walking on arouns the sky island I knew something was wrong. This game never failed to dissapoint me with everything. It was ridiculous how we had to wait so long for this? I mean what justifies the wait? The building mechanics? This game didn't need building mechanics, I barely even used it. I would've much prefered them put effort into other parts of the game

It was just a cash in. Same game, only a few sky stone platforms, I won't call them locations. In the words of AVGN - "What were they thinking?"

i just have absolutely no idea how nintendo just made the same game but with 2 new levels (that have nothing in them) and gmod car building and it took them more than 6 years to throw it out

I find it interesting how different our play styles seem to be. For example, I found myself rarely using the traditional combat system. I almost always used some combination of the environment, materials in my inventory, and my bow rather than close quarters combat. The way you described the combat system does sound rather monotonous, but it never bothered me because that isn't how I engaged with the game. Part of me wonders if a not insignificant part of our differing levels of enjoyment stem from our different play styles. A game that lets you decide what systems to engage in and how can lead to experiencing practicality different games. Edit: Since I don't feel like I fully got this point across in my comment I wanted to clarify this here. I can see why someone who separates the puzzles from the combat could find either uncompelling. But I find issue with separating those two. I never took issue with the simplicity of the combat system because I viewed each encounter as it's own unique puzzle. And what that puzzle looked like depended on everything from what kinds of enemies there were, if they were hostile to each other, their weapons, my weapons, my materials, the environment, and if I had any kind of time sensitive factor like a cold resist effect wearing off. None of that changes how interesting the explicitly included puzzles or combat system are, but it does greatly change the actual playing experience.

I love this game!! I’m not mad at all if people disagree. Everyone is entitled to their opinion. I just feel sorry for anyone who was looking forward to this game & it let them down. I had super high hopes for this game & it’s better than I could’ve imagined so I’m super happy!!

I just find it weird for us to wait 5 plus years on what's basically an expansion of the og game. Like I understand Majoras mask was made on a dare but when you can get more original stuff from a game that took a year to make over one that is the same scenario but 5x the development time kinda makes you ask a few questions.

Your not alone. I feel like you were very spot on. Personally I feel it’s that they’re chasing the younger generation that likes to just **** about. Things like Minecraft and this new vehicle building stuff “do it your way” just appeals to them more than good story and puzzles that actually challenge you. You also have a guy running the show who doesn’t even like the original game. There is a reason Aonuma talked about changing things so much. It’s not so much he is tired of Zelda formula as it is he hates it. Guy said he didn’t even like original game because kept dying to starting enemies. Not until link to the past when he could go around cut grass did he start to warm up to the series. The man doesn’t want to make challenging adventures. He wants to make **** about simulators. How the heck did he get the job over Koizumi?

You're putting your channel on the line lmfao respect

My biggest complaint is nintendo heard people complaining about the difficult shrines and korok puzzles and they made all them easy in totk. Since many puzzles can be brute forced you can put your own restrictions to challenge yourself. Take the addison signs, you can complete most of them with a hoverstone, but i have more fun forcing myself to use the wood planks.

Cant tell you how many times i tried to build cool things and the game stopped me in some way or the other every time. Reload to make adjustments to flying boat machine. Flying boat machine is gone. Rebuild flying boat machine and get it to take off. Flies for a minute and then parts disaapear. I fall. I sad For a game based on building, I was stupefied

I figured that tears would fix all the shortcomings of breath of the wild but instead we got half fixes instead hoping the next game fixes it

As someone who enjoyed my time with totk and wasn't disappointed with it, I think you have some very good points about the flaws in totk. I can see why you don't like the game and even looking back at the time I spent playing the game, I really did create my own fun with the vehicles. Creating different war machines was extremely fun and it completely overshadowed the shallow combat system because you expect the tank you created to complete obliterate the bokoblins. The way I would describe it is like an open world gmod. In gmod you can create basically anything but there aren't any enemies in the small maps to use your creations on. Totk has a populated map you can use all your creations in so its more rewarding to create thing in it. Totk is basically more a sandbox game then a zelda game.

I am definitely one of the people who was in a honeymoon phase with this game, nostalgia really does somehow manipulate and blind your critical eye. The start of the game I still love even though it's basically the start of botw but the change in scenery was enough for me. I thought about all the massive sky islands I'd be able to explore, then I dropped into Hyrule like a game of fortnite and thought "wait I'm already back here?" Later on I noticed just how small the sky islands were in comparison to the starting area and any islands I did find worth checking out were just for the same boss I'd seen a bunch of times and a shrine missing a crystal. Which admittedly was fun the first time, but this game takes fun concepts and overuses them to a point where you're just sick of them..

This whole game felt like a chore so I quit after 40 hours

its super telling honestly that most of the people that love totk and botw its their first zelda game. thats why they love it, they love bland open world sandbox walk around gawk simulator rather than an actual adventure game with classic zelda concepts. this game and botw are the worst 3d zeldas ever created. the minute they do twilight princess combined with open world then itll be the best 3d entry

I never knew you could use ascend to get to the final room in the Water temple. I just used Sid's water shield.

The only way I've been able to love this game is by tuning out all the observations you made. I agree with all of it. I actively suppress the bad things, pretend it's not bad, and this process is painful XD. The sky and the depths are deeply disappointing. I am especially livid about the depths. Shouldve had relics, references, way more ruins and extremely interesting points of interest -- it was a bunch of MINES. THATS IT. There should've been old disturbing castles and villages you explore. I wanted to find an ancient, busted ocarina somewhere. Could you imagine what they could've done? I hate the sky shrines and there are way, way too many freebie shrines. That upset me. I was upset to find the DLC armor in the depths and there are people out there justifying their location as references to past games. I just won't give Nintendo that kind of excuse. The story? The lore? One word: Zonai. That's it. Everything is about the Zonai. Everything. Oh and I can't believe the copy and paste cutscenes for the sages. They should be humiliated by this. The Sheikah technology "disappeared" too. Humiliating. Zelda stories are already simple enough and they could barely hold this story together. There are so many plot holes a real, professional writer would've caught. Wtf. It is not hard to craft an incredible story along with incredible gameplay. I am fucking SICK of hearing that their philosophy is gameplay first, story second. No. DO BOTH. I don't understand them. I don't get it. It pisses me off. Other games do both, why can't Nintendo do it? I've played Zelda most of my life so yeah I'm pissed because I love the series. They made so many lazy decisions. So many incomplete ideas. So much halfassing. Copy and paste. I think I need to play Elden Ring. I've only watched it on streams a bit. You got me excited about it and now I want to buy and play it. Like you, I am utterly baffled, confused, perplexed, dumbfounded, and extremely irritated that they had six years using the same assets. Something isn't adding up. I don't get it.

Just wanna add my vote to the depressingly small "TotK is disappointing" position. It will never not be frustrating that I had to fight people's nonsense criticisms of BotW AND people's nonsense praise of TotK. I can absolutely confirm from experience that yes, most people don't actually have anything resembling consistent standards and will ping-pong between praising and condemning the exact same thing regardless of context depending on which way the wind is currently blowing. I was 100% behind nintendo using BotW as a foundation for a whole new generation of Zelda games, but TotK as a direct sequel in development for 6 years is flat out not acceptable and has immediately squandered most of the opportunity BotW had to be a soft reset by being a nonsense time travel plot, bringing back EXACTLY the critical issue that turned the Zelda timeline into such a mire of pointless confusion that it warrants a soft reset in the first place. Almost none of the glaring issues of BotW have even had fixes attempted and the new stuff completely ignores player psychology 101 in ways I never would have expected from nintendo, specifically the fusing and zonai devices completely failing to account for the basic motivation to find and employ a dominant strategy. Almost all of the no item shrines (particularly the "stealth" ones) can have their premise completely subverted by just charging in, fusing whatever to whatever, and mashing attack, and greatly reward you for doing so by cutting the time to complete WAY down with no consequence since you lose all items and fully heal at the end anyway. Almost all creative uses of zonai devices are purely for the sake of novelty and surely a more monotonous and inconvenient solution compared to something much simpler, but in either case they mostly amount to busy work assembling it, especially because ONCE AGAIN like with Hestu in BotW, one of the most basic QoL mechanics in the game (autobuild) is locked behind optional content you can spend 90% of the game without because you didn't wander by the right section of map early on. Weapon durability is even more of problem and I am utterly baffled how anyone considers fusing a fix of any description; now instead of one category of loot made a constant and permanent disappointment due to evaporating if I so much as dream about maybe swinging it around for a bit, we have two, weapons and monster parts, and now I have to fiddle about the weapon menu even more and scroll right for 100 life-ages of the universe thru a new, terribly designed "quick" menu to reach the thing I wanna fuse. I can say with no hyperbole that I spend less time in menus in Dragon Age: Origins combat, a party-based real-time with pause strategic RPG than in Totk, a simple hack and slash. Problem solved?

You hit the nail on the head when the story of TOTK could had took place 10.000 years. The game could had been much better and given Nintendo that excuse to completely remake the world of Hyrule but nah that would had been too much work.

I loved this game to death and have over 200 hours in it already but you bring up some good points, many of which I agree with. However ultimately the negatives, for me, were vastly outweighed by the positives. This was a very solid review and I'm glad it exists.

From the moment the awful name “Tears of the Kingdom” was unveiled, I knew something was seriously wrong. Every Zelda game prior had a name that had a lot to do with the main themes of the game. The Tears of the Kingdom are merely the memory tears of Zelda. That’s just describing an item sort of thing for memories, it doesn’t describe the game at all. This shows that Nintendo had no idea what the theme of this game was and it shows in the final game. They should’ve called it “Arm of the Zonai”, “Arm of Sealing” or “The Long Lost Stones”. Something has gone wrong at the Zelda faculty of Nintendo.

One thing that I think ties a few problems together is the games inability to tackle "emergent player behavior". Essentially, the combination of the games massive freedom, but poor rewards and some very overpowered tools yields an end result where people will find the shortest path possible by default, and that often comes at a cost of ignoring the games own mechanics. Because when you have poor rewards for everything, it wont be worth players time to do something long-winded to get to it. For example, the towers. These are way "stronger" than in BotW, in that they let you travel much further. This subtly encourages players to use them when they want to travel somewhere, instead of engaging with the build mechanic to make some sort of transportation. This also has the effect of players skipping exploration. You will miss all the caves/camps/etc on the way to your target, as you're 5000 feet above ground. So again, the game is encouraging you to skip its own content by way of overpowered tools and poor rewards. There is something similar with ultra-hand too. You could spend 30 minutes building some whacky car to do a job...or you could spend 5 minutes gluing 2 fans and a steering wheel together. I don't think the game was tested to a wide variety of people. It honestly feels like only the developers played it, and of course they wanted to engage with the things that they added to the game.

I agree completely with this review, which isnt something I say a lot about reviews online. I always thought it was a mistake to reuse BOTW's map, I was dissapointed before launch and it's the worst to now know all my fears were correct. There's no way they could have reused BOTW's map and armor sets and weapons and still lived up to the hype of a sequel. It just feels like a bad DLC. I might even say the Champion's Ballad was more substantial.

I originally played TotK a month after its release and I anticipated an amazing experience with how much my friends praised it and mentioned it being better than BotW or being an amazing game in general But when I finally began to play the game for myself I was waiting for the moment where I genuinely felt excited and in awe like my friends did I immediately started saying how much of a disappointment this game was to me after I beat my 2nd dungeon and my friends were very confused considering I'm a pretty big LoZ fan and BotW was my 2nd favorite game in the series behind Majora's Mask (It still is to this day as I have a big soft spot for it even with all its problems but if I were to go back I'd definitely be a lot more critical) Nothing in the game felt like they improved what BotW did right and I genuinely wanted to stop playing after only having put around 30 hours into the game I pretty much have the same criticisms you described throughout your video Only thing I'd say is different is TotK having a better atmosphere to it than BotW since I actually liked the feeling of the world feeling empty after having been gone for 100 years and no one remembering you I guess the combat would be another thing but I didn't really care for it too much since I'm not into LoZ games for its combat Anyway, I finally beat it after having sunk in 100 hours or so and I said it was the worst 3D Zelda game by far which lead to me being called delusional or told I was nitpicking with my criticisms But weeks pass by and they later began to agree with me and finally understood what I was getting at This game was so frustratingly underwhelming that I needed to experience a good Zelda game and decided to finally play Twilight Princess for the first time Easily in my top 5 LoZ games and it made me remember a lot of the aspects that made me fall in love with the franchise to begin with At this point I believe Nintendo should never attempt another open world LoZ game whatsoever cause none of the magic was there in TotK Just a half baked disappointment that did so little to improve aspects on its predecessor while taking so many steps back at the same time I'm glad there isn't a DLC cause I'd probably dislike it as well considering the rest of the game On a side note: you brought up Elden Ring into the mix when describing what the game should've done One thing I always heard from a friend of mine was he wished this game was "more like Elden Ring" and at the time I hadn't even played a single Souls game Last month I finally got around to playing Elden Ring after beating the Dark Souls trilogy along with Bloodborne and I finally understood what he meant by that after all this time

Bros the type of dude to buy a box of fruity pebbles, count and separate each piece by color then complain there’s not enough red flakes in it.

Your "Zelda Feeling" statement really hit home. The success chime from the OG game being played when I just put the round peg in the round hole always seemed a little hollow in BOTW. I wonder how many of the dev team played NES Zelda as a kid. It took me like three years to complete it as a kid. I haven't played TOTK and likely will not.

Theres no excuse, the weapon shit was, and is still bullshit, and why I have no desire to play this.

Yep. I don't have an issue with physics/chemistry based puzzles, but they it's like they refused to tap into its potential out of fear surrounding potential lack of tutorialization due to open progression, even though the puzzle mechanics are intuitive as hell. After seeing the light mechanic of the the Lightning temple I was expecting a solar powered electricity mechanic. Or puzzles requiring recall to a line up a moving mirror with a moving, extra stubborn light switch. Or even shooting a crumped ceiling to let a necessary additional light source. Instead I got another brick in the wall... At least that dungeon had global state changes that impacted other rooms. This is a list of underexplored/unexplored puzzle concepts I thought of while being disappointed in the dungeons/shrines: Using recall on a mechanism to redirect water to create a waterfall aka a ladder. Using a waterfall to fill up an empty reservoir Using a water to vertically conduct a current. Magnetism Electromagnets Melting wood/ice protected by water Shattering a submerged object protected by the momentum dampening effect of the water Hyper-buoyant objects used more frequently for slingshot traversal puzzles combined with water level manipulation. Switches that require alternating current (created using recall on a generator) instead of direct current Hot air balloons not working in environments that require goron armor. And then finding a way to circumvent this through global temperature manipulation. Breaking ice to unobstruct wind updrafts Wind powered generators Focusing light to ignite a fire (flammable material behind by a glass or mesh barrier that only light can penetrate) Rubber objects (electrical impedence and disabling circuits in general) Momentum puzzles requiring reducing friction (creating ice, removing sand, removing muck) Mechanical circuits requiring the construction of gears. Clock wise and counter clockwise screw mechanisms. (Cannot uprooted with ultrahand unless unscrewed. Cannot be rotated without leverage on the top stub) Weighted wedges used for breaking durable obstructions. More mechanical advantage puzzles using levers, pulleys and ramps. More puzzles based on creating ceiling platforms to ascend through that utilize chemistry system or movement or momentum.

Imagine if they decided to make the game all underground, instead of going to the skies again. Would've added to the whole Zonai mystery, and added some more dungeons.

The enemy variety in BOTW and TOTK is an affront to God

Tears just seems like a big DLC package for BOTW.

Take a shot everytime he says elden ring

Ok I fucking adore TotK, BUT! I will say, your reasoning and explanations do make sense, I can understand it, but I can’t share the same view

I almost immediately knew that the new mechanics were a sham, and that the game was a half baked cash grab. Not only is Nintendo allowed to release a bad product and still get rave reviews, but that product doesn’t even have to run well or be technically impressive. Soys are a powerful thing

I am also dissapointed that it was literrally botw with scrap mechanic attached to it

One thing I personally adore in this game is the total lack of a clue of just how MUCH stuff there is when you start a game. To me, the vague familiarity was great, because it helped me feel like Link, returning to a very changed world after a month or so being stuck in the sky and missing a world-changing event. I started adventuring, with a few very clear goals, just like in BOTW, and when i learned more about the story and realized I had no clue what I was actually looking for, I had this moment where i realized that i had no idea where the story was going to go, and that I wanted to travel Hyrule just to see what had changed and whether everyone was doing okay and where Zelda could have been. Gameplay and story merge so much better in this than in BOTW, and I think the team did a great just at making the player feel like Link all throughout the game. Also, I‘m the type of person to 100% games, but do it very slowly over months, so yesterday i noticed that i have 150 hours in TOTK, much more than my 100% BOTW run, and it still feels like I have seen at most half of the game. I love that, that‘s exactly what I wanted. I can see why it‘s disappointing for people who value other things in their games, though.

Something with these open world sandbox games is when people brag about them lasting for hundreds of hours, and while they probably won't admit this but it's true, I know that is the same 5 hours of content repeated dozens of times. I'll admit the main quest and shrines in TOTK are genuine content and offer a good 30~40 hours of true solid gameplay, but after that you are left with the pseudo/filler content; the repetitive crap that makes the game "last" hundreds of hours: koroks, bubbulgems, Addison signs, finding all the armor sets, activating all the lightroots, getting the map to display "100/100%", and grinding materials for upgrades (unless you are one of the lucky ones that used duplication cheats, skipping at least a hundred hours of captivating gameplay the devs desperately want you to endure er I mean experience). I really don't mind this stuff being in the game, but saying the game lasts hundreds of hours is disingenuous when the only meaningful content is like 30 hours long. This is true for many modern open world sandbox games, not just TOTK.

One of the things that bothered me was the solution to every shrine/dungeon is to build something. At least with BOTW it would use a few different abilities. In Tears every shrine i completed required the use of ultra hand. Another thing, which is a problem with most modern games, is the lack of music. The plunky piano and a jingle every so often does not inspire a grand adventure. Like the Great Sea Theme, or the Hyrule Field theme do.

I have such mixed feelings about this game. I feel like it undoubtedly improved on BOTW at the very least, and if a game like TOTK came out in back in 2017, it would've been mind blowing. But now, with how far gaming's come since BOTW and with the long years of waiting, expectation, and better games on next gen consoles... TOTK feels like a fun, nostalgic romp through familiar territory, but it's just too little too late at this point. It's 2023, and "BOTW2" running on the same tired hardware is just not groundbreaking or novel anymore... I dunno. Like I said. Mixed feelings. I bought the game out of a feeling of obligation, since I remember my time with BOTW so fondly. I enjoyed my time with TOTK but it feels like rewatching your favourite childhood movie as an adult: the cracks start to show and you realise it wasn't ever really as great as you remembered... It's a nostalgia trip coming back home to this world, but that's just not enough in 2023... also... MAKE ZELDA PLAYABLE, YOU COWARDS!!!

This is gonna sound odd, but mid air shooting now just used a set chunk of stamina itstead of constantly depleting stamina. Ik they have done it to fit with the new arrow system, but it takes away the cost of time and that in later parts of the game you are rewarded for being able to fire as many arrows as possible not a set amount.

They basically just used the depths to hide amiibo treasure. That’s the extent of the purpose the depths served. The sky served to hide maps that would lead you to these amiibo pieces in the depths. In short, the sky and depths are obsolete and offer nothing to the actual game because you can literally skip the entire depths and it wouldn’t affect how your journey on th surface plays out. Nintendo also decided to inconvenience the player just so they can avoid resembling anything remotely similar to “old Zelda”. Example, instead of an item subscreen that would make using abilities and items so much easier and more convenient, they consolidated those abilities into armor, a never ending chain of consumables to scroll thru mid swing in combat, and the sages. You have to run up to a sage during combat and press A to activate the ability you want. This is actually so horribly implemented, it’s universally agreed upon that everyone turns off the sages. Imagine your ToTK biggest advocate , turning off a major combat mechanic because of how useless and poorly implemented it is. This is classic Nintendo stubbornness , just so ToTK doesn’t have anything linking it to what an old Zelda game would have despite how perfect it was. Nintendo has sacrificed quality for the pursuit of being different. And this is seen all thru out the game in so many areas. ToTK is IMO the worst Zelda game of all time and as far as overall let downs go, the biggest of all time.

I can't agree more with you. The game was too easy. Ultra hand is overkill. This game is a Zelda "sandbox" game. Not a Legend Of Zelda game. Breath Of The Wild did it better. Miyamoto did it better. Not Aonuma....

Even as Zelda being my favorite game series and longtime Nintendo fan. This was the first Zelda game I've played that genuinely left me disappointed after finishing it. With BOTW it is was easy to overlook some of these issues because how fun the exploration aspect was & being the 1st in the series taking a big new direction & risk. Keep in mind I put in 115 hours into TOTK because I wanted to get as much as I could from this game and found that only a select few moments really stood out like the great sky island & the buildup up to the wind temple had me ready to overlook a bunch of minor gripes I had found so far, only to be disappointed by the fact the "dungeons" were less complicated than some shrines. Moving forward I hope the Zelda team finds the right balance for Zelda. I would love to see the best off all the 3D Zelda games combined. I feel if they can fully integrate that in a healthy balance with newer ideas the series can truly evolve and blossom.

I can really agree with the sky islands criticism,I got really disappointed when the main area where you get the 4 shrines was the only largest area in the skies :/

this video isn't as long as it would take to review totk in comphrensive but I still dont understand how it has 50% dislikes. literally nothing he said was blatantly wrong. I think its ridiculous that every game people like has to be a 10/10 even if its flawed and awful. I guess slop sells

You may not not agree, you may not like his opinion, but you can't say he's lying.

I took me about 5 hours to understand that I will probably never finish this game. I truly hate the direction Zelda took with BoTW! I can't even begin to explain how much I HATE that they give you every tool almost within the first hour of the game. It kills any sence of progression for me. Once again korok seeds and health/stamina upgrades are the only rewards in the game... are you f-ing kidding me!!! The thing I've always loved the most about Zelda games is the thrill of what new upgrade/item/gear the next temple or dungeon holds, and of course the temples and bosses themselves. It's almost shocking to say this but both this and BoTW feels so lazy. Your "Tears of the kingdom forces players to create their own fun, rather than provide a fun experience!" is spot on, and I feel this is a common problem in A LOT of fully open world games.

I can't believe you didn't mention how easily you break the story, with people still talking about "Zelda" demanding stupid things here and there even when Link obviously know it was not her, or people (including Link apparently) still looking for Zelda even when you already pulled out the Master Sword from her head. At one point I avoided exploring the few new things because I knew I could break the story. Also, Ganondorf's big plan was to "confuse" people and cause them minor annoyances with her Zelda puppet?! Ganondorf is supposed to represent power, not outsmart others, you can expect that from villains that have no strength but brain, like the Joker in Batman, not from Ganondorf.

I was so excited about exploring the sky just to find out 90% of non-story islands are just platforms for the same boss and repetitive crystal fetch quests ;-;

Bro was ahead of his time 😂 Look how most people agree with him now. Some of his criticisms even feel gentle to other ones I’ve heard.

I'm the biggest Zelda fan out there and haven't even finished it yet do to the redundancy. *sigh

I love the journey that botw and totk offer but i have to agree, these games should have had way more enemies . All the old ones with a handful of new ones.

I'm really glad you made this video, because my "honeymoon" phase is now over, and I really do see this game for what it is. I can't even remember the sheer amount of times I paused my game and said to myself out loud "What the fuck were the game designers thinking?" or "How did this get past play-testing"? The physics programmers did a phenomenal job with this game, and so did the sound design team and composer; however after only 15 hours of playing the game it already starts to feel bland, and the recycled assets really come to light. The Depths are literally just Hyrule itself, just mirrored: it's lazy. Don't get me started on the sky islands. The mechanics are clunky, and absolutely not straightforward : the sage abilities almost made me throw my controller several times, and some mechanics were also impossible to discover by yourself (ie reflection of Dorf's gloom projectiles). The game is also way too big, as BoTW was already starting to exceed the reasonable size a game should be. I really do feel cheated with this game, and I'm glad to not be the only one to think so. Thank you for sticking up for us, man.

Everything you said in this video was spot on (except for this being better than botw's story.) This game is absolutely inexcusable. The thing with botw's flaws is that they were excusible due to the game being so new and revolutionary. Totk was not revolutionary, it was just built on botw, therefore it should've fixed all its problems. Yet it fixed almost none

I feel like Nintendo took all the criticism with lack of story and and recycled enemies in the first game and basically just doubled down on all of that. Like "remember the story that wasn't there and the same enemy camps that nobody likes? Well we have a lot more of that for you and we'll throw in some janky building mechanics to make it even more tedious". Thanks Nintendo, this was the exact opposite to what I was hoping for in this game 😂.

Literally the only 3 enemy types im missing personally are Skulltulas, PROPER Redeads, and Darknuts. GOD I wanted a Darknut fight so bad. Imagine if they put Darknuts below Hyrule Castle. It would have made the final approach to Ganon a bit more interesting.

I love the game, but i also love to listen to many different opinions… and lengthy youtube videos to chill after a hard day. So cheers to you my friend and thank you. I hope the stans will spare you

It is crazy how much someone's playthrough can vary and change opinion. I'm not going to sit here and say the Depths were awesome, but we had very different experiences. I found it thrilling up until about 50 hours in to try and find new light roots. Looking at the surface map and piecing together where I wanted to go, stealthing by pretty much all enemies (no matter how late I got into the game, I did not want to take gloom damage), and navigating the darkness was awesome. I really loved it up until I was about done with my playthrough, which is great with me. If I can like a mechanic for 80-90% of a game and then see it as mid later, I still see that as a big win. Great video, hate You didn't like it as much as you wanted to.

Its nice to hear a critical review from a Zelda Vetran. So on point about the issues and missed opportunities. Personally, this game was such tedium for me. Oh great, the open world I explored for hours in Botw....I have to explore for another countless amount of hours...thats not exploring. Its an echo of a grind fest. Oh, I get to collect and upgrade armor I have already collected and upgraded before...what a trudge. For me it was hardest excecting the build mechanic....auwfully cumberson having to rotate and attach objects, fail and repeat...so many times. Like you said, these are not puzzles...its just busy work. Peace out. Zelda love

After playing TOTK I now know how my childhood hamster felt exploring the pointless tubes and running on the hamster wheel.

I agree with everything you say and yet I'm 130 hours in and still having a blast. It doesn't make any sense.

Man the comments section is overwhelmingly in agreement, yet the ratio is barely over 50%, it's insane how hiveminded the community can be.