#every time i think i'm done bitching about the zonai there's just more showing up

[pitchblackespresso]

That post you just reblogged re: ToTK’s handling of Zonai tech replacing Sheikah stuff and unnecessary backstory for calamity ganon really put into words a lot of the feelings I have about ToTK that I’ve never been able to articulate. It does make me curious on your opinion on this, though: how would you have gone about writing ToTK differently?? What would you keep/change? Do you think the Zonai as a whole could be done away with and would that improve the story and the coherence to botw?

(This is the post Anon is referring to)

I will preface this to say that I'm not a writer and haven't got some superior version of the plot in mind that would fix every issue. I also want to say that I genuinely love TotK's story.

I have a weird relationship with the Zonai. I made a post a while ago detailing why I dislike the execution of the Zonai in TotK, especially the weird "everything was the Zonai all along" narrative they tried to push. I don't think they should be removed altogether, since they are so intrinsically tied to the plot (despite us knowing almost nothing about them...), but their influence on everything needs to be nerfed. The Sheikah tech doesn't need to be inspired by the Superior Zonai Tech. The Forgotten Temple and BotW's Hyrule Castle don't need to be Rauru's.

The Zonai devices, on the other hand, I absolutely despise. They look horrendous, clash with literally everything else, and aren't even tied into Zonai culture (what little there is) in any significant way. They're just ugly pre-made assets for people to mess around and for the developers to flex the physics engine with, without any justification for their existence lore-wise. I'd get rid of those in a heartbeat, and instead flesh out Rauru's arm magic. Making the Zonai purely magic-based, rather than "technology", would go a long way about fixing their aesthetic, as shallow as that sounds.

So yeah, it'd be nice if more of their culture was developed, especially their influence in the sky islands and depths, but also not shoehorn them into every plot thread and turn them into BotW's illogical and unnecessary backstory.