Ok so time for my potentially long and rambling review of Tears of the Kingdom. No spoiler tags here because mostly the whole thing could be a spoiler; so don't read unless you're ok with spoilers.
As a whole, good game. I mean, I'd like to think I wouldn't spend 280 hours beating a game that I didn't think was good, with plans to spend lots more time in post-game. A few of my favorite positives:
- The cave exploration is probably my favorite new thing compared to BOTW. It's pretty much always exciting to find a new cave entrance.
- The general vertical mobility is so nice and freeing; moving around the sky whether on a vehicle or just gliding is great. Same with the Ascend ability, rockets, etc.
- The story is really cool. While still a fairly minimal story that doesn't progress with the game itself like how it was in BOTW, the basics that were there were just really neat.. the concept of Zelda being sent back in time, so that she could spend thousands of years helping the Master Sword become strong enough to defeat Ganondorf; that's great. Really makes it even more Zelda's story than BOTW was (which was also largely Zelda's story).
- The fuse system is great, at least for weapons. Aside from giving more reason/motivation to kill monsters, it allows for a lot of great experimentation.
Now for the bad. I'm writing this after all the specifics below, but put it above all since it's more important to an overall review. The game suffers from 2 really big problems in my opinion: Repetitiveness and general open-world structure.
- Repetitiveness - The dungeons are a good example, and especially the cutscenes you get after beating each dungeon. They take an idea that is interesting and cool the first time you see it.. and then just have you do it over, and over, and over. Same with the labyrinths. A labyrinth requiring you to handle all 3 of the different maps within one giant connected puzzle? Yes please! But then the next labyrinth was also that, and so was the 3rd. And not only in the overall structure of involving all 3 maps, but in the specifics of what you do on each of those maps. Why did the sky of all 3 have to be "fly around in low-gravity finding and activating the 4 terminals"? Why couldn't each be its own thing? I've spoken about dungeons before and do again briefly below, so no need here. But it's the same with sidequests like "bring peace to ____", and some of the types of sky islands.
- The structure of the whole open world thing - By far my biggest problem with the game. I've talked some about it before... but there were so many different examples where it kept coming up. Basically, the game was fighting with itself in wanting to be fully open world, but also wanting you to follow the path it laid out for you. You would get punished for exploring an area too early. And I don't mean punished as in running into enemies that were way to hard for you to fight yet... I remember that happening with finding Moblins at the very start of BOTW because I went the opposite way they suggested you do. That is simply a fun way to do open world. I mean punished by wasting your time. Either because you're trying to do something that isn't possible yet, but it's not obvious that it's not possible yet, or because you're doing something that is possible, but much more frustrating because you're supposed to do it later. And again I don't just mean fighting an enemy before you've become powerful enough to do it. A few examples:
- Not getting the paraglider right away. They let you explore the surface freely without it. Without giving you any hint about if there even is a paraglider in the game. Shrines that require the paraglider but not obviously so. No hint that you're missing something.
- Following the statues underground. They lead you to where Kohga is hiding. If you do them in the right order. If you instead follow the wrong set of statues because you notice what looks like an interesting thing that probably leads to something, well too bad, it leads to nothing at all.
- Dragonhead / Thunderhead Isles. You can go there while they're still shrouded in clouds. And nothing gives you a hint that you should wait until they clear up. Exploring a hard-to-see area is literally something the game makes you do in the depths and a few other places. It's somewhat hard and frustrating... but not nearly as frustrating as learning that if I'd just gone to beat Hyrule castle first (which I assumed would just be the end of the game!), then I would have been able to clear the skies and explore those islands with visibility. I can't say I really know what the solution would be... it doesn't fit within the open world concept if you went there and it just voided you out with some NPC telling you sorry, come back later. Then again, that's exactly what they do if you try to explore the ring ruins early! Which is a related example... we had no way of knowing if we were just supposed to do a better job sneaking over there, or finding the right angle to approach from; or if (as it was) that you have to wait until the story progresses further before you can go there.
- Allowing you to go all the way to a dungeon without your helper. This happened to a friend of mine; wasted so much time in the Wind Temple trying to figure out what to do because he had no idea he was supposed to have someone with him.
Notes on a few specific types of things:
Shrines: I was disappointed that shrines returned at all, and that their reward was exactly the same as BOTW. I guess I just wanted it to be more "new" in overall flow of the game. It's cool that there are more shrines this time around, and none of the shrines seemed stupid or bad. The combat shrines (proving grounds) were all much better than the Test of Strength shrines from BOTW.
But it didn't feel like any were as long as the 5 or so longest shrines from BOTW. I remember a handful of BOTW shrines which were very huge and involved; not just solving 1-3 quick puzzles but really exploring around the place. Also, there were way too many "blessing" shrines! I'm seeing 44 as the number online; not from an official or community-driven source yet. Of those, only 23 even required you to do something external to unlock the shrine. It's one thing when a "blessing" shrine is really just where the real shrine was the puzzles we solved along the way, but the other ones are just rewards for finding the shrine and nothing else.
Dungeons - Already talked about this in a previous post, but they weren't the return to Zelda form that we'd all been hoping for. By far the worst part was the repetition; where the core concept of all 4 dungeons was the same. The bosses were all good improvements over BOTW though. And the dungeons as a whole were improvements.
The helpers - A very neat idea, and implemented pretty terribly. I love the concept that Link is building up a party like Secret of Mana or other RPGs. Especially as a contrast to BOTW which was all about being alone in the world. The fact that they not only give you new abilities but fight with you is great! But... it's just mostly terrible. Just look at how many memes there are about Tulin ruining everything by activating when you don't want him to. They all work that way. They're both hard to activate when you want, and way too easy to activate when you don't want. And then even aside from using their abilities, they visually get in the way of just looking around. So many times I've had to just turn them all off because I can't see what's in front of me. The abilities themselves are hit and miss. Tulin in the sky; great. Tulin on the ground; terrible. Yunobo is cool, but you quickly realize that he's not nearly as good at breaking through rock walls as you'd assume. Really his power should have just been that if he hits a breakable wall, he keeps going until he hits a non-breakable wall. That wouldn't have been overpowered, and only useful in a handful of various places. But imagine just firing him at a tunnel blocked by many layers of rocks and he just keeps going all the way through, instead of breaking just the first layer. Sidon is cool in how many "non-obvious" uses he has, such as keeping cool against heat damage, and activating your Zora weapon bonus.
The sky - The sky was an awesome set-piece and was really great when you were doing stuff with it. But there wasn't enough to do with it. Way too much empty space with nothing even close to it. And again, repetition was an issue. While there were plenty of interesting and unique places up there, there were also places that were just exact copies of other places spread throughout... specifically the construct battles and the "airports".
The depths - Very cool. I was blown away when I found out that in addition to the already huge world, there was a second equally huge world to explore. The way it mirrored everything above was really neat, and having to make your own light to explore it was really neat. It would be nice if the landscape/terrain/scenery weren't pretty much identical throughout the whole thing. But I don't think it suffers from the repetition problem as much as the other things do. Like with the Yiga fortresses; each one is at least a bit unique in terms of the layout and the type of yiga vehicle you have to fight.
The abilities - Extremely impressive, and very open with how they can be used. All of them felt like they had more use than all the BOTW abilities. And I LOVE how you could combine them together... like if you need to get up higher; use ultra-hand to lift a platform over your head and hold it there for several seconds. Then use rewind to have it automatically stay up there without you holding it. Then use ascend to go up through it (or it could have picked you up when rewind sent it up; then ascend somewhere now within reach above you).
Building stuff - This was interesting and impressive, but sort of felt out of place. Like what does screwing around with building vehicles have to do with adventuring, exploring, and stopping the return of Ganondorf? Even when you build vehicles to help you explore, that feels at-odds with things like horses and climbing. It's not a complaint, exactly, because it doesn't harm anything to have it there. But if this same game released with everything else the same but no ability to construct vehicles (meaning it probably would have released a year sooner), would people not have thought it still just as great a game?
The final boss - The last phase managed to outdo the scale and epicness of the last phase of BOTW. But like the final phase of BOTW, it was beyond easy, like there was no real way to even take damage. The first 2 phases were generally tough; though didn't feel like they actually tested your skill as much as the first 2 phases of BOTW. That is to say, I felt like it was easy just because I had a huge amount of health and a very strong weapon (master sword with silver lynel saber horn on it). It was mostly hack and slash; didn't require me to skillfully deal with the boss.
Final thoughts: Very impressive game. Pretty much improves on BOTW in every way; and I really loved BOTW. But even as addicting as it has been and me looking forward to every night when I get to play again, the sense of wonder wore off quicker than it did in BOTW. All the things that were impressive and amazing were mostly only impressive and amazing the first few times I saw them. Now they're just mechanics that I do and don't think about how cool it is. BOTW really had a "WOW" factor from being so huge and open, and TOTK can't quite match that.
