#if totk has no haters then i am dead

[riddlemearose]

There were a couple of things for me.

The first was realising the plot, especially the opening tutorial area, was a copy-paste from BOTW. Ghost King, area secluded from the rest of the map where you have to complete four shrines to leave, etc etc. It didn't have any of the importance that I felt the Great Plateau did. Hearing Zelda's voice, watching the Calamity awaken and envelop the castle, and finally having Rhoam himself be the one to ask you to save Zelda and the rest of the Kingdom hit hard, and I didn't get any of that w/ Rauru and the sky islands.

The next thing was the loss of the Sheikah tech like everywhere - and finding out that the devs were like "yeah it just vanished". Umm what? The Sheikah and the ancient technology is one of the two cores of BOTW's whole narrative, with the other core being nature. Number 1 how do you just strip that away, especially when it's so key to Hyrule's history? And number 2, what's replaced the Sheikah tech then? The answer is nothing. The Zonai were introduced to be a replacement, but the writers never went in depth with anything about the Zonai. They lived, they died, we get to use their stuff for free.

The Secret Stones. Wtf is up with them? It feels weird that Ganondorf is causing the regional phenomena to stop people from finding the Stones or something, when literally no one knows wtf a Secret Stone is, nor would be able to or have any reason to go access the temples where they're kept. Ganondorf causing the regional phenomena is the direct reason anyone gets a Secret Stone. If he didn't do anything (like he does w/ the rest of the plot), then Link wouldn't have a single Sage?????

The biggest thing for me is the plot. For an open-world game, TOTK has an extremely linear and extremely shallow storyline. The thing about BOTW is it literally doesn't matter what order you do anything in; the story is the same and, better yet, it's wholly unaffected by your choices (in a good way obviously).

Totk does not have that. For example the devs don't want you to get the Master Sword before you find all the other Dragon Tears, Mineru and clear the Great Deku Tree, despite giving you the technology to get to the Light Dragon.

So if your story is reliant on people following it in a linear way otherwise they either get massive spoilers about important plot points, then it shouldn't be in an open-world game.

And finally Ganondorf. Oh my god, Ganondorf. This might get catch some shit but I dunno how they managed to make him more bland. His entire character is literally summarised perfectly by Yunobo in-game as "we don't know anything about the Demon King other than the fact that he's bad news and super strong".

Writers that is your main antagonist! We should know stuff about him? We should know his motivations and they should be more complex than "wants to destroy everything bc Power"?? What are you doing???

I was done w/ the game by the time I got to Ganondorf. Walked into the boss fight w/ several rocket shields, at least two 5-shot Lynel Bows and about 800 bomb flowers from exploring the depths to hide from the plot. Whole thing was over Very Quickly.

To summarise, here are my thoughts on TOTK Cons: the entire plot Pros: Glide Armour

wont have time to work on anything for a few days probably, so uh, since i love reading comments/tags of people sharing their experiences- as part of the preparation for the totk rant script i got another question to ask :3

if you dont like tears of the kingdom, was there a moment that "broke" you, as in, the moment you knew this game is worse than you thought/hoped, and if so what was it?

personally, while i was suspicious after seeing its last trailer, i told myself its just me again and i kept up my hopes for a long time into my playthrough- its hard to point to a specific point since it was a growing feeling of something being off, things didnt make sense and i ever so more wondered how they would pull this all together (they didnt)- i do think the moment i stopped being in denial about it was when i found the shrine of life, the beginning of botw, and found .. nothing, a dingy cave practically licked clean of any traces of the shiekah tech like it never existed, instead of the medical bed a pathetic puddle of water that healed you, no one caring at all, like it actually never happened- i felt like the game pointed and laughed at me for caring about botw, pretty sure i was struggeling to keep it together on stream bc it forced me to realize this game truly is everything i hoped it wouldnt be, even if that sounds a little weird, at that time zelda and especially botw was so much more important to me, a passion for the franchise this game really did end up killing.