#When Power is better and not trying to kill Ganon he is 100% gonna add to the commentary

[skyloftian-nutcase]

Ganondorf discovers his greatest enemy

Ganondorf took a sleepy breath as he shifted a little to get more comfortable. Link had been groggy at best and downright unresponsive at worst, but the healer had said it was likely due to the amount of blood he’d lost and the medicine Ganondorf had been instructed to give him. In either case, it delayed the inevitable conversations that would come, that had to come. Ganondorf would gladly take this time to just hold the sweet boy and not think about how much pain and potential hatred Link held for him, because of him.

The look in the boy’s face when he’d turned to see Ganondorf, neck pouring blood like a faucet, eyes terrified, had yet to be wiped from the Gerudo’s mind.

He really didn’t want to address any of it. It was a cowardly sentiment, and he despised that he felt it, but for just a little while longer, all he wanted was to hold Link and protect him from everything, including himself.

Link sniffled sleepily, tucked between Ganondorf’s arm and his chest. He’d hardly moved, and the peaceful look on his face quieted the anxieties in his guardian’s mind.

The door to the bedroom opened slowly, catching Ganondorf’s attention. He saw his other child of destiny peeking in, green hat missing from his golden head. He must have been out riding, given how his usually perfectly quaffed hair was windswept and messy.

“How’s he doing?” the captain asked, approaching with soft footsteps.

“He’s sleeping well, at least,” Ganondorf answered. The little king in his arm scrunched his nose a bit at the sound before rubbing his cheek further into Ganondorf’s tunic to get comfortable.

The elder Link hummed thoughtfully, observing his predecessor, before holding out a booklet. “I found this in the market. It’s quite popular among the—well, it was recommended to me for someone who might be homebound caring for family. Good way to pass the time and all.”

Ganondorf looked at the booklet curiously. He wasn’t much of a reader, honestly, but he supposed he could be kept entertained for a little while. He could just leave the captain to watch the younger Link, but he didn’t want to let the child go.

Child. He’s far from that. But he really wasn’t. Not in Ganondorf’s mind, at least. In either case, he didn’t want to leave him, so this would be a nice distraction while the younger one slept.

When Ganondorf glanced at the booklet, his eyes widened a little. He glanced at the captain. “The Secrets of the Imprisoning War? Who would have such information?”

Link just smiled sweetly. “I heard it’s an engaging read. Perhaps there are some truths in there that even you do not know, old man.”

Ganondorf squinted. There was something mischievous in that smile. He knew this boy well enough by now, loved him and cherished him and simultaneously wanted to knock his head into a wall. While his younger hero was quiet and seemingly passive off the battlefield, his older one was brazen, charismatic, and cheeky. The captain could be as cold as ice and serious when he needed to be, but when he didn’t…

He’d give him the benefit of the doubt. For now. “We’ll see.”

The older hero nodded a little, opening the curtains a bit more so there was better lighting on the bed. The room in which they were staying was a large one with a balcony, so perhaps Ganondorf could just carry his charge outside and they could relax and read there. He’d just stay here for now - it was only late morning. He opened the booklet and began reading.

The Imprisoning War: An epic time in Hyrule’s history, from ages so long past that scarcely a fact is known about it, filled to the brim with fantastical legends that all come to the same conclusion: the Hero victorious, evil banished away for the rest of eternity, a primordial curse shattered into pieces. But what do we know of the players in this epic quest? What if their struggles, their losses, their secrets and loves? This is their story, ranging from the Hero’s steamy relationship with the Sacred Diplomat to the secret love life of the incarnation of evil himself.

Ganondorf choked on his spit. The—the secret—WHAT?

What did that boy—what was—

Din’s Fire this was—now he had to read it to figure out what the hell this was all about!

Naturally, Captain Link was still lingering outside the room with his friend, cackling when the former terror of Hyrule exclaimed, “I DID NOT HAVE AN AFFAIR WITH A—WHO WROTE THIS??”

“Okay, okay, wait,” Lana wheezed. “Do you think he got to the part where he had a steamy moment with the dragon queen or was it the unsuspecting perfectly beautiful peasant woman?”

“With that much insult in his tone? Definitely the peasant,” the captain answered between laughs.

“I CAN HEAR YOU TWO!”

With that singular warning, Lana and Link fled the area, breathless with amusement.

[darkarm66]

Breath of the Wild review

On the Wii U, I had The Wind Waker and Twilight Princess in their HD remastered forms....and barely touched. This is reoccurring issue with me and remasters, even with games I love. No matter how much I loved them the first time, there are some games I won't touch again and it was mainly due to the beginning stages. I dreaded going though Ordon Village again and knowing I'd have to put up with those tutorials again to get to the parts of Twilight Princess i did enjoy. So once Link wakes up Breath of the Wild, gets his clothes and Sheikah Slate and I got to run around with my meager abilities and items, I knew that this game was gonna be a classic. Yes, that's all it took. Now, there have been many many reviews that extolled the excellence of Breath of the Wild, much better written reviews when it came out, possibly on the verge of hyperbolic. So allow me to add to it. And yes, not only is this the best game of 2017, It very well could be one of the greatest of all time. While those reviews have mentioned Witcher 3, Skyrim, Arkham Asylum and other open world games as direct influences (Nintendo said as much as well), this game inspired feelings in me I haven't felt since Xenoblade Chronicles. And like Xenoblade Chronicles, Breath of the Wild succeeded due to not just the high amount of gameplay but also by eliminating a lot of wonky, reductive elements. 

There's no invisible barriers that prevents the player from going where they want to go, once you get off the Great Plateau after getting the runes in the Shrines, the player has everything the need to explore this amazing version of Hyrule. And the exploration was felt lacking in previous Zeldas. You knew that special icon or crack in the ground required the player to retrieve the item from a dungeon. Now, you just have to go there and a lot of it just jumps out at the player. This time around, Hyrule itself is a dungeon with so many puzzles that tempt to player to stop moving and just fiddle around for a bit. The world is littered with seemingly out of place shapes and it draws the player in a way that doesn't feel contrived or blatant. And even if a trail isn't apparent or there's no natural way to enter a place, the climbing mechanic breaks all of it. Climbing itself becomes its own minigame because its governed by a stamina wheel and the weather system, which does allow the player to be challenged by where they can climb but it doesn't allow the player to break the game by going everywhere. And speaking of challenge, get ready to eat humble pie with the simplest combat system but toughest enemies ever. 

This Hyrule wasn't afraid to hand the player its ass over and over. And the lack of tutorials and locked rooms that teach you to fight means you're not stuck in this one place until you get it right. If you die, you come back and try again or move onto somewhere else to do something that won't kill you. When I tried to put off the story as much as I possibly can, I ended up discovering Shrines (in a minute, not yet), Koroks, rupees, side quests, food. Until I became bored and started the Zora quest line, which delighted because I got to climb up a waterfall with ice blocks and led to the real menace of Hyrule: Lynels. This is when previous Zelda game would put you in this room and turn this into a boss battle to see if the player has gotten any good. Not this time, it didn't care that I didn't have enough hearts, or my shields were too weak, or my weapons were brittle. So I just turn around from the high point and glided to somewhere else instead. While players will have to fight to actually survive, Breath of the Wild let the experience teach the players.

And mainly, those Shrines is how you get experience points. The Shrines are dotted the map, some not even trying to hide, some taking maddening puzzle solving, others rewarding the player for figuring out all the clues. Not only is this how the game facilitates fast travel, it also scratches that dungeon crawling itch for a bit, but only by being a puzzle shrine or a combat shrine. It lacks the incredible intertwining of previous Zelda dungeons but the light content and brain stretching use of items makes up for it. Especially since the player is always rewarded with a great item. Unless its a weapon...

Okay, in the early goings, weapon durability can be a bummer. Weapons break too common and by the time you get used to one, its gone. That's not the worst part of it. The problem comes when good weapons do start becoming more readily available but not you're out of slots because you don't wanna waste your Royal Broadswords on some basic ass Bokoblins because you know a Lynel needs that work more. However, you deal with it because all the puzzle solving and wander lusting led to Korok seeds to expand the inventory, so now by the time you wanna start wrecking things, you're actually equipped to do so this time around.

I also believe that the durability allows the player to actually replay certain areas. While other games use powerful enemies as gates to keep the player away for a few hours, that doesn't feel like it this time around. The map allows players to actually keep tabs on where they may want to go but don't feel like dying to do so. Place that stamp down, go somewhere else and come back to it when the player truly feels ready. I remember Miyamoto talking about how they wanted Zelda games to be able to replay certain areas for a reason. And now they didn't have to force the player to do a bunch of fetch quests or pixel hunts to come back to an area they already beaten. This makes Hyrule feel more livelier this time around because no matter how much time you spent in one area, you can come back to it and discover something hiding under your nose this whole time but you couldn't see it just yet. Or it has a dope sword you really needed but didn't have room for.

But one thing to make room for: food! There was something so hypnotic about resource gathering and cooking, in a way that surpasses Final Fantasy XV's photo-realistic dishes. The abundance of materials, which not only kills the tedium that might have killed lesser games, allows players to actual feel free to consume and experiment with everything they've gathered. In the beginning, basic meals are cooked to give your health a chance withstand raiding an enemy camp. By the time you're in the 100 hour mark, players are hunting to create complex dishes that give them dope buffs to make a play session a more pleasant.

One pleasant thing this go around is the story. For all the flack Nintendo gets for its approach to stories, it only gets it because they're not telling it through the usual cinema envy of other games. This is a deconstruction of Link and being the chosen one. Link isn't just gonna be handed all the tools needed to succeed just because he was chosen. Same goes for Zelda, who seems heartbroken that she has to be the reincarnation of a goddess. And thanks to the Memories questline, you get to see those cutscenes but they aren't automatically triggered because you did a thing. You earn those previous moments beforehand that showed Link and Zelda not truly feeling going along with what destiny wants to do because it worked 100 years ago...which was probably Nintendo's feelings developing this game.

For years, Eiji Aonuma talked about breaking the conventions and in the gameplay and story, that feeling comes across well with Divine Beast Champions, especially who they just fall doing what they were told to do. This is truly about how Zelda's dev team felt about coming together to give the same results, only for it to fail before it even began and the task fell to new people to do what's necessary to defeat Ganon through new means. It's deeply personal and the emotion maturely understated. Link and Zelda develop as legit characters through their struggles and heartbreak and it gives the story an emotional richness not seen since Ocarina/Majora. Link (and the player) truly earns the right to be called a hero, not because he was chosen but because he endured and grew.

I haven't even mentioned how beautiful this game is. Forget your need for 6 billion polygons per sec to animate a face. The details astounding from up close and far away. Climb to the top of the mountain and you see a sprawling, diverse horizon to take your breath away or look down to see a forest or lake or camp to possibly sail down. None of it ever stops looking gorgeous. My favorite place in the game revolved around a Shrine that needed an Orb to unlock but the area you were in was completely dark. Seeing Link as a shadow, lighting torches to move around this area was utterly beautiful and proves that developers don't need to high end CGI cutscenes to make a visual impression that last forever. Speaking of lasting impressions, this is one of the best UI I've seen in a game. It conveys information and stats without completely cluttering the screen and taking away from the game world. Even when playing in handheld mode, you can stil take in a lot of visual treats of Hyrule.

And despite the impression that I'm ready to marry this game, this game isn't flawless. Weapon switch is a legit pain. Holding down one button to switch to a particular weapon isn't as intuitive as the other controls in the game. You're better off just pausing and switching items, which sorta breaks the immersion for the player. Also, as great as the Koroks and Korok puzzles are, did their have to be 900 of them. I'm all for trolling the player and subverting expectations for attempting 100% completion, but 900?!? That quickly veers between padding and repetitive. And the dragons can suck it. Only one item drop per appearance and god help you if you don’t want a scale. Again. Which leads to the upgrade system being underwhelming, due to its limited focus on armor and not weapons.

What makes me ignore these flaws: the game never forces you to do any thing mentioned before this (except the first four shrines and runes). You never have to find a Korok seed (but why the fuck wouldn't you?!?), you never have to expand your health and stamina, you don't need to cook a meal, get the Master Sword, ride a horse, shield surf, regulate your temperature, complete a shrine. The game is indifferent to your progress. But you will do any and all those things because Breath of the Wild is excellent at triggering your curiosity and intellect  and rewarding it, not rewarding your patience. Best of all, nearly everything you do fits into a mechanic the benefits the player, the quest aren't just a collection of repetitive checklists of escalating numbers nor is its badly tuned mechanics just thrown for the sake of variety. (Take that, open world games!)

This is not to say the previous Zeldas were awful. They didn't get tens and awards for nothing. You may even miss the linearity. They were great for what they are. Breath of the Wild is just better. Instead of telescoping design and handing you the fun stuff when you did the one thing it told you to do, it trusted the players this time around to make their own fun and build their own legend. Players will end up completing the same things but everyone will make their own path to completion. Breath of the Wild is worthy of the praise it has received and then some. It break ground by avoiding all the pot holes and wasted soil of previous Zeldas and open world games and brought  freshnesss that hasn't been felt in years. Truly a game that lives up to the word 'Legend'

[chandelierslayer]

So... I also noticed while going through my archive that I tend to reblog other people’s stuff and go on huge rants/rambles/analysis-fests, while still piggybacking on their stuff, instead of making a whole new post. So I figured I’d fix that while I’m at it. I meant to start this sooner but NaNoWriMo has me pretty preoccupied. And I was sleeping way too much for a while. BUT ANYWAY ENOUGH ABOUT MY PERSONAL LIFE. Here’s the big rant about Zelda and how much I care for her (even though hearing her speak irritates me):

Also, keep in mind that this is in regards to the end of BotW, so if you don’t want spoilers... Well, I tagged this as spoilers so yeah.

I hate that she only talked about Link and Ganon and the fate of Hyrule etc. Just once, I wanted to hear her say ……

…..Actually, I don’t know what I wanted to hear her say. I don’t know. In all honesty, I just wanted to hug her. Like. I just want to sit her down and hug her and be like NO girlfriend, let’s talk about YOU for a minute. I’m gonna make you some fruitcake and tea and we’re gonna just chill and you can cry it out as much as you need to or whatever, just focus on YOURSELF for a minute.

You’ve been locked in this situation of keeping the reincarnation of the demon king sealed away so he can’t hurt anyone for a hundred years. A HUNDRED YEARS. 100 YEARS. There’s no way that was easy, even WITH the power of the Goddess and the Light Force and the Triforce of Wisdom (um… Triforce? It looked like the whole thing when she killed him. Are we departing from the “each of these three people gets one” system? ANYWAY). I can’t even begin to imagine what that would be like. How did your mind stay intact, honestly? I just.

You gave up everything. You wanted to have a fulfilled life, chasing your dreams, being a total fucking nerd and studying the things that fascinated you. You had goals. You had a life. And when the signs of the Calamity showed up you jumped to the task willingly, thinking “Oh yeah, my knowledge of ancient shit is gonna help us save the world, this is gonna be great” but then your dad forced you to leave that behind and go try to awaken the power of your bloodline. And you went. It was the RIGHT decision, because that power would be needed to take down Ganon, but that doesn’t make it FAIR. In ten seconds flat you went from happy kid studying things she loved for fun, to stressed-out kid beating herself up relentlessly because no matter how hard she tried she couldn’t feel the sacred power, couldn’t do the ONE THING that was expected of her, the one thing that could help her save the world. You took the weight of the world on your shoulders, literally, and even when your power finally awakened, you STILL felt like a failure because it was too little, too late. Your champions had all fallen, including your knight. You had to go take on the demon king. Alone. And a hundred years later when everything’s over you’re like “I’ve been watching over you all this time” like wtf get out of town are you serious right now? You didn’t even think about yourself, you just. I’m crying right now, y’all, for real. Oh my gosh. This woman.

Okay now that my face is dry…

I’m not even gonna BEGIN to get into how much I hate that Sacrifice at the Expense of the Self is always portrayed in shit as this great amazing noble thing because it’s BULLSHIT, it’s NOT noble, it’s fucking STUPID, and I get that in this case she had no choice BUT to sacrifice everything to save the world etc. because she was literally the only one, but PEOPLE WRITE SCENARIOS LIKE THAT ALL THE EFFING TIME. Especially with female characters. Like. You have a CHOICE. The people who wrote this story had a CHOICE, and they CHOSE to go this route. …Oh look, I said I wouldn’t go into it, and here I am, going into it.

Seriously though, I’m glad this was a Zelda who actually DID THINGS (there are more of them than people think), but I hate that her doing things happened at the expense of herself. Her life. Even before she lost her dad and saw her kingdom torn to pieces, she had to turn away from the things she loved and her very way of life as she knew it to chase some faerie tale she wasn’t even sure would work. Nothing is of her own agency, except that one final decision, once everyone else had fallen and her power was finally awakened, to walk back up to the castle and imprison Ganon by herself. And I mean. Hah. Right. “Decision”. Like she really had a choice in the matter. That moment is the most bittersweet. I just. UGH.

Zelda never really gets to shine without being diminished in some way. The Zeldas in the first three games (And ALBW) were just there to be rescued, the Zelda in Ocarina of Time got to help out a ton while in disguise (via cross-dressing! A++) but once she reveals her pink-dress-wearing, non-ninja self she’s reduced to yet another DiD. And an overly helpless one at that, for the sake of a last-minute race against the clock challenge. I mean, you can blast Ganon with a huge-ass beam of light, and lift up iron bars like it’s nothing, but you can’t dispel some flames and kill some basic monsters? I call bullshit. Oracles Zelda was only there for the linked game ending so the bad guys could try to sacrifice her to resurrect Ganon (weeee), and the Zeldas in the Four Swords trilogy were hardly there. WW and TP’s Zeldas are finally badass, though, the one in TP was forced to surrender her rule to a usurper king and sit by quietly - though she did get to do stuff later in the game. Tetra, on the other hand, was a badass pirate captain. Buuuuuut once her identity is revealed, again, she’s reduced to Princess Form, even having her clothes change magically from pirate garb to a pink dress (is that… did you put MAKEUP on her? With MAGIC? That’s not her skin tone! UGH.) for no reason whatsoever. What makes me happy is that in Phantom Hourglass, she’s gone back to her pirate threads and refuses to be called a princess. And rightly so! The world in which she was a child of the royal family is gone now, sealed beneath the ocean forever. She never knew that world. The Great Sea is where she’s really from. Just because you have a bloodline doesn’t mean anything, it doesn’t change who you are. Thank you for letting her be herself, Nintendo. YES I HAVE A LOT OF FEELINGS ABOUT THIS.

Spirit Tracks Zelda probly did the most out of them all, because she came along on the journey the whole way, albeit as a ghost most of the time (it’s a long story). And SS Zelda is another self-sacrifice person. Impa’s like “Lemme explain what happened forever ago and who you are and what you need to do and why” and she’s just like “Okay!” and does all the things. No second-guessing, no complaining, she just goes on this long journey and eventually seals herself away to save the world (please tell me this is not gonna become the trend) with nothing but faith that it’s gonna work out. I just.

YOU ARE SUCH A GOOD CHILD FOR SAVING THE WORLD AND DOING WHAT’S RIGHT BUT YOU ARE A PERSON TOO AND YOU MATTER AND YOUR THOUGHTS AND FEELINGS MATTER AND YOU DESERVE TO CARE ABOUT YOURSELF AND I LOVE YOU AND I DON’T KNOW WHAT I’M SAYING ANYMORE IT’S LATE AND I NEED TO GO TO BED I HAVE WORK IN THE MORNING BUT PLEASE CHILD JUST TAKE CARE OF YOURSELF OKAY?

Here, have some old tags, just because they add to the ranting:

Zelda, The Legend of Zelda, spoilers, ranting, rambling, thoughts, sacrifice, self-sacrifice, writing talk, female characters, tropes, Damsel in Distress, crying all over my damn keyboard, WHY CAN'T A FEMALE CHARACTER JUST SHINE WITHOUT BEING DIMINISHED OR DEGRADED IN SOME WAY???, NINTENDO YOU'RE BETTER THAN THIS, YOU DO WELL, YOU DO SOME REALLY GREAT THINGS, BUT YOU NEED TO WORK ON THIS SHIT OKAY?, I'M SERIOUS, I'M LOOKING AT YOU TOO SQUARE ENIX, KAIRI LITERALLY JUST EXISTS TO BE FOUGHT OVER SACRIFICED FOR OR TO JUST SIT THERE AND WAIT OR BE IMPRISONED ETC., IF I CAN'T PLAY AS KAIRI IN KINGDOM HEARTS THREE I'M GONNA FLIP ALL THE TABLES, YOU TOO DIGIMON, DON'T THINK I DON'T SEE YOU STILL FAILING IN THE FEMALE REPRESENTATION ARENA AFTER SEVEN FUCKING SEASONS, YOU HAVE HAD SO MUCH TIME, COME ON, APPLIMONSTERS IS AMAZING AND I LOVE IT BUT GIVE ME MORE FEMALE CHARACTERS, AND LET ERI-SAMA ACTUALLY PUNCH SOMEONE, FUCK, I'M TIRED OF HEARING ABOUT DOKA-PUNCHES AND SEEING NOTHING