if you're spoiler sensitive for this game then don't read this thread.
i was indescribably excited for this game in 2023. i have only now, in november 2024 finally got around to playing it, because for the last 18 months my life was so busy such that i would not have been able to give the game my proper attention to "enjoy" it. i literally cut myself off entirely from the gaming world in that time so as to avoid spoilers for it. this game is one the biggest disappointments of my entire life. i'm just going to list all the things wrong with it one by one and let them speak for themselves. pretty much the only thing i can think of from the top of my head that i liked about this game that botw hadn't already done is the music-theme to the sky, but even then it plays on repeat for dozens of hours and so you quickly sicken of it; the middle-english tablets side-quest was kinda funny i guess too, but only because i've read a little chaucer before, and even then i only understood half of them.
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there is NOTHING IN THE UNDERGROUND! just bosses that you've already fought a dozen times already, some useless 'schemas', zoanite to enable you to go and see MORE of the empty underground, and thousands of tongue-in-cheek references to the previous BETTER games in the series via the costumes.
i have rarely been so frustrated with a game in my life: some times in my playthrough rivaled elden ring and hollow knight in that regard—AND THAT'S NOT A GOOD THING!!! the way the planes would just crash into a wall because you can't see anything in front of you in the underground and so fall to ground destroyed, OVER AND OVER AGAIN, wasting many many minutes of your time as you try to explore, almost drove me to madness.
85% of the time the structures and machines you build just don't work or else collapse pathetically because the system was designed by ****-heads who should be working as basic microsoft representatives and not game-developers. and when they do work the time and tedium it takes to build them is usually not worth whatever they are being built for.
many of the shrines in this game BARELY have working solutions to them, and are otherwise some of the most frustrating, boring, tedious and painful things i've ever had to do in a video-game.
the sky is painfully boring to explore, hours spent slowly gliding across it with the paraglider or a plane that times-out inexplicably after 60 seconds. and then there's nothing at all even to be found up there except repeated bosses, the occasional shrine-puzzle and two light-reflection puzzles.
there's a star-island in the middle of the map that's too high to even reach! so have fun wasting your resources and time trying to get there!
often zonai devices you select to take out don't appear for several seconds so you go to your inventory to take them out again thinking you didn't do it correctly the first time, only to then end up having taken dozens of them out because then the first ones catch up.
the way the caves with wet walls or ice-walls cock-block you from climbing is easily as frustrating as anything elden ring spits at the player: the ceilings are too low to use the rockets or springs and so you are forced to painfully, slooooooowly inch your way up with a couple of ****ing hover stones.
the way zelda-ganon forces you to follow her around the whole castle before the phantom-ganon fight is just inflationary bull****.
almost every single npc paraphrases the same stuff! either "zelda's vanished, isn't that odd??!?" or "there are mysterious ring ruins in kakariko...". or else they just repeat the same sentiments they had to express in botw with a different spin. they almost never have anything new to say that hasn't already been presented in the official exposition of the story.
the way it constantly tried to emulate feelings and moments experienced in oot or botw or ww in cutscenes or otherwise was just painful, like making an enormous fanfare over giving link the sage rings for his figers—trying to emulate the medalion acquisition bits in oot—or zelda's final vapid words in the post-credits scene, vainly trying to recreate the feeling of the final scene in botw; or cece trying in vain to recreate moments from windfall island. giving the gleeok majora's mask musical motifs for literally no reason whatsoever other than to stuff another self-reference in there.
the construct temple boss was one of the most painful things i've ever had to endure in video-games.
the way the gleeoks for some reason can catch you with their beam attack when you run around them, but not when you run away from them: i guess they have trouble lifting their heads but not turning them??
from the get-go, copy pasting almost everything—map, enemies, npcs, etc.—from the previous game is NOT A RECIPE FOR A GOOD GAME!! and probably cripples the game outright even IF the rest of it is exceptionally good. majora's mask was very VERY VERY different to oot!
the cutscenes and story are terrible and bland and simple and boring, FULL of plot-holes and inconsistencies. the dreadful nickolodeon voices of all the characters almost made my ears bleed. ganondorf was about as dull a villain as you could ever imagine, riding as far as he possibly could his cult-reputation built by previous games. we see the exact same slow boring cut-scene FIVE TIMES after every temple! yes botw's story was simple, but it embraced that simplicity and delivered the story in a clever and engaging way, and though the voice-acting in that game could be a little grating at times, on the whole it was good, unlike this cartoon network cookie-cutter rubbish.
i've rarely felt more apathy for a main character in a piece of entertainment as i did for sonia and rauru—they did NOTHING to make me care about them!! you have cute floppy goat ears, I DON'T GIVE A ****!
the gerudo boss is bugged in that direct hits to the face sometimes will and sometimes won't make him collapse when he's in his sand state, so just chuck lynel bombs at him and hope for the best. also it's very unclear when the gibdo hives are actually vulnerable to burst and the game never even mentions this about them. you very much have to go out of your way to find the sand boots, and if you haven't found them then the gerudo boss is even more painful.
you're really going to force me to COLLECT AGAIN EVERYTHING I ALREADY COLLECTED IN THE PREVIOUS GAME!!! without even so much as a feeble attempt to explain why link somehow lost everything he owned when ganondorf cooked his arm?
the game seems to think we never played botw and so basically needs us to pretend link has again lost his memory so it can tell us all over again what everything and everyone in the world is, just so it can inflate itself even more.
the final phase of the king gleeok is purely down to chance whether you die or not, unless you want to spend hours grinding it to speed-runner level of perfection, so it's either hope you have a shield-rocket in order to shoot it down before it gets too high, or you die.
the akkala thunder gleeok was designed by someone with **** for brains.
the rain in general is almost insufferable in this game due to how rockets and springs are not the most common things to come by in the game, and besides it's good to save them for gleeoks, and revali's gale is gone. also swimming is horribly painful because cryonis is gone and trying to build a raft that works well is like having a stroke.
have fun with some of those froxes whose arenas are covered with gloom unless you want to cheese them with bullet time and arrows to eyes.
you're always fighting mobs of enemies on assist mode because tulin's always there at the ready because i'm not going to open the menu every single time to put him away, and then get him out again when it's over.
using the avatars is often annoying because they won't spawn if the terrain isn't perfect for them and then you have to run over to them to grab them blah blah blah.
good god having to cycle through my whole inventory every time i want to use a fie or ice arrow, or even just an arrow that's going to do more than 1% of damage, is horribly painful and absurd game-design.
the gloom hands are just another unfun, annoying, unsatisfying thing to deal with that drag the game down even further.
NO i'm not going to collect a single korok more than necessary having already spend dozens if not hundreds of hours collecting them in the previous game, so there goes another crutch the game was probably leaning on for the player's interest.
just getting around the map is a pain now because there are less warp-points because half of them are now in the sky.
have fun trying a billion combinations for the specific recipes required to upgrade your horse if you're not lucky enough to have stumbled across them by chance otherwise.
oh, and the camera is bugged when you try to shift it with z-targeting, sometimes it will move around, sometimes it won't, oh well!!
the self-referencing throughout the game is almost sickening, it's almost as if it knows it can't stand on its own shoulder-to-shoulder with the others, and so has to constantly remind the player that it is a 3D ZELDA GAME, like an annoying stinking old man constantly reminding everyone around him of the glory of his younger days.
and lots and lots of other little things that come up, that seem to be just down to lack of care and attention of the developers and designers.
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it's a bad game! and ironically still retains a large amount of that typical standard of nintendo polish! but we all know that you can't successfully polish a turd, no matter how much you try—the result, if you do so try, is totk.
the design of this game was disgustingly lazy and uninspired and bad; this was a blatant cashing-in on the success of botw, with minimal effort to offer anything new to the player. i'm a life-long 3d-zelda fan, and some the best experiences of my life have been in playing the previous games; i honestly can't believe myself when i say that i'm not going to play the next one unless it's RADICALLY different to totk. but honestly, nintendo are probably dead at this point: it's probably been downhill since skyward sword, with a brief recovery with botw. whatever and whoever it was that produced the nintendo games we loved 10 and 20 years ago is long gone now, and now some parasite has infected its empty shell and is just producing bland replicas of what was, much like AI does all over the internet, and much like phantom ganon's impersonation of zelda in this very game, ironically. i hope metorid prime 4 will be good, there's a chance at least as dread was good; but i doubt it at this point, as i think mario's even done-for if wonder's anything to go by. it makes sense that it would be so if you look at the rapidly degenerating world around us also, considering the state of global politics etc.
[p.s. before you try and say that i'm bad at games and so that's why i found the mechanics frustrating, know that i am clever and capable: i can make complicated programmes with java, had an exceptional score in mathematics in school, can diy-renovate a house, can cook complex things, have 1500 hours in competitive smash, have beaten almost every boss in elden ring in an extremely nerfed and difficult self-imposed challenge-run, etc. not trying to brag, just establishing that i'm not an idiot, but am intelligent and capable—and so am entitled to say that this game's systems suck ass.]
i was indescribably excited for this game in 2023. i have only now, in november 2024 finally got around to playing it, because for the last 18 months my life was so busy such that i would not have been able to give the game my proper attention to "enjoy" it. i literally cut myself off entirely from the gaming world in that time so as to avoid spoilers for it. this game is one the biggest disappointments of my entire life. i'm just going to list all the things wrong with it one by one and let them speak for themselves. pretty much the only thing i can think of from the top of my head that i liked about this game that botw hadn't already done is the music-theme to the sky, but even then it plays on repeat for dozens of hours and so you quickly sicken of it; the middle-english tablets side-quest was kinda funny i guess too, but only because i've read a little chaucer before, and even then i only understood half of them.
==========================================================================================================
there is NOTHING IN THE UNDERGROUND! just bosses that you've already fought a dozen times already, some useless 'schemas', zoanite to enable you to go and see MORE of the empty underground, and thousands of tongue-in-cheek references to the previous BETTER games in the series via the costumes.
i have rarely been so frustrated with a game in my life: some times in my playthrough rivaled elden ring and hollow knight in that regard—AND THAT'S NOT A GOOD THING!!! the way the planes would just crash into a wall because you can't see anything in front of you in the underground and so fall to ground destroyed, OVER AND OVER AGAIN, wasting many many minutes of your time as you try to explore, almost drove me to madness.
85% of the time the structures and machines you build just don't work or else collapse pathetically because the system was designed by ****-heads who should be working as basic microsoft representatives and not game-developers. and when they do work the time and tedium it takes to build them is usually not worth whatever they are being built for.
many of the shrines in this game BARELY have working solutions to them, and are otherwise some of the most frustrating, boring, tedious and painful things i've ever had to do in a video-game.
the sky is painfully boring to explore, hours spent slowly gliding across it with the paraglider or a plane that times-out inexplicably after 60 seconds. and then there's nothing at all even to be found up there except repeated bosses, the occasional shrine-puzzle and two light-reflection puzzles.
there's a star-island in the middle of the map that's too high to even reach! so have fun wasting your resources and time trying to get there!
often zonai devices you select to take out don't appear for several seconds so you go to your inventory to take them out again thinking you didn't do it correctly the first time, only to then end up having taken dozens of them out because then the first ones catch up.
the way the caves with wet walls or ice-walls cock-block you from climbing is easily as frustrating as anything elden ring spits at the player: the ceilings are too low to use the rockets or springs and so you are forced to painfully, slooooooowly inch your way up with a couple of ****ing hover stones.
the way zelda-ganon forces you to follow her around the whole castle before the phantom-ganon fight is just inflationary bull****.
almost every single npc paraphrases the same stuff! either "zelda's vanished, isn't that odd??!?" or "there are mysterious ring ruins in kakariko...". or else they just repeat the same sentiments they had to express in botw with a different spin. they almost never have anything new to say that hasn't already been presented in the official exposition of the story.
the way it constantly tried to emulate feelings and moments experienced in oot or botw or ww in cutscenes or otherwise was just painful, like making an enormous fanfare over giving link the sage rings for his figers—trying to emulate the medalion acquisition bits in oot—or zelda's final vapid words in the post-credits scene, vainly trying to recreate the feeling of the final scene in botw; or cece trying in vain to recreate moments from windfall island. giving the gleeok majora's mask musical motifs for literally no reason whatsoever other than to stuff another self-reference in there.
the construct temple boss was one of the most painful things i've ever had to endure in video-games.
the way the gleeoks for some reason can catch you with their beam attack when you run around them, but not when you run away from them: i guess they have trouble lifting their heads but not turning them??
from the get-go, copy pasting almost everything—map, enemies, npcs, etc.—from the previous game is NOT A RECIPE FOR A GOOD GAME!! and probably cripples the game outright even IF the rest of it is exceptionally good. majora's mask was very VERY VERY different to oot!
the cutscenes and story are terrible and bland and simple and boring, FULL of plot-holes and inconsistencies. the dreadful nickolodeon voices of all the characters almost made my ears bleed. ganondorf was about as dull a villain as you could ever imagine, riding as far as he possibly could his cult-reputation built by previous games. we see the exact same slow boring cut-scene FIVE TIMES after every temple! yes botw's story was simple, but it embraced that simplicity and delivered the story in a clever and engaging way, and though the voice-acting in that game could be a little grating at times, on the whole it was good, unlike this cartoon network cookie-cutter rubbish.
i've rarely felt more apathy for a main character in a piece of entertainment as i did for sonia and rauru—they did NOTHING to make me care about them!! you have cute floppy goat ears, I DON'T GIVE A ****!
the gerudo boss is bugged in that direct hits to the face sometimes will and sometimes won't make him collapse when he's in his sand state, so just chuck lynel bombs at him and hope for the best. also it's very unclear when the gibdo hives are actually vulnerable to burst and the game never even mentions this about them. you very much have to go out of your way to find the sand boots, and if you haven't found them then the gerudo boss is even more painful.
you're really going to force me to COLLECT AGAIN EVERYTHING I ALREADY COLLECTED IN THE PREVIOUS GAME!!! without even so much as a feeble attempt to explain why link somehow lost everything he owned when ganondorf cooked his arm?
the game seems to think we never played botw and so basically needs us to pretend link has again lost his memory so it can tell us all over again what everything and everyone in the world is, just so it can inflate itself even more.
the final phase of the king gleeok is purely down to chance whether you die or not, unless you want to spend hours grinding it to speed-runner level of perfection, so it's either hope you have a shield-rocket in order to shoot it down before it gets too high, or you die.
the akkala thunder gleeok was designed by someone with **** for brains.
the rain in general is almost insufferable in this game due to how rockets and springs are not the most common things to come by in the game, and besides it's good to save them for gleeoks, and revali's gale is gone. also swimming is horribly painful because cryonis is gone and trying to build a raft that works well is like having a stroke.
have fun with some of those froxes whose arenas are covered with gloom unless you want to cheese them with bullet time and arrows to eyes.
you're always fighting mobs of enemies on assist mode because tulin's always there at the ready because i'm not going to open the menu every single time to put him away, and then get him out again when it's over.
using the avatars is often annoying because they won't spawn if the terrain isn't perfect for them and then you have to run over to them to grab them blah blah blah.
good god having to cycle through my whole inventory every time i want to use a fie or ice arrow, or even just an arrow that's going to do more than 1% of damage, is horribly painful and absurd game-design.
the gloom hands are just another unfun, annoying, unsatisfying thing to deal with that drag the game down even further.
NO i'm not going to collect a single korok more than necessary having already spend dozens if not hundreds of hours collecting them in the previous game, so there goes another crutch the game was probably leaning on for the player's interest.
just getting around the map is a pain now because there are less warp-points because half of them are now in the sky.
have fun trying a billion combinations for the specific recipes required to upgrade your horse if you're not lucky enough to have stumbled across them by chance otherwise.
oh, and the camera is bugged when you try to shift it with z-targeting, sometimes it will move around, sometimes it won't, oh well!!
the self-referencing throughout the game is almost sickening, it's almost as if it knows it can't stand on its own shoulder-to-shoulder with the others, and so has to constantly remind the player that it is a 3D ZELDA GAME, like an annoying stinking old man constantly reminding everyone around him of the glory of his younger days.
and lots and lots of other little things that come up, that seem to be just down to lack of care and attention of the developers and designers.
==========================================================================================================
it's a bad game! and ironically still retains a large amount of that typical standard of nintendo polish! but we all know that you can't successfully polish a turd, no matter how much you try—the result, if you do so try, is totk.
the design of this game was disgustingly lazy and uninspired and bad; this was a blatant cashing-in on the success of botw, with minimal effort to offer anything new to the player. i'm a life-long 3d-zelda fan, and some the best experiences of my life have been in playing the previous games; i honestly can't believe myself when i say that i'm not going to play the next one unless it's RADICALLY different to totk. but honestly, nintendo are probably dead at this point: it's probably been downhill since skyward sword, with a brief recovery with botw. whatever and whoever it was that produced the nintendo games we loved 10 and 20 years ago is long gone now, and now some parasite has infected its empty shell and is just producing bland replicas of what was, much like AI does all over the internet, and much like phantom ganon's impersonation of zelda in this very game, ironically. i hope metorid prime 4 will be good, there's a chance at least as dread was good; but i doubt it at this point, as i think mario's even done-for if wonder's anything to go by. it makes sense that it would be so if you look at the rapidly degenerating world around us also, considering the state of global politics etc.
[p.s. before you try and say that i'm bad at games and so that's why i found the mechanics frustrating, know that i am clever and capable: i can make complicated programmes with java, had an exceptional score in mathematics in school, can diy-renovate a house, can cook complex things, have 1500 hours in competitive smash, have beaten almost every boss in elden ring in an extremely nerfed and difficult self-imposed challenge-run, etc. not trying to brag, just establishing that i'm not an idiot, but am intelligent and capable—and so am entitled to say that this game's systems suck ass.]
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