#it goes into totk as it is very detailed otherwise

[ganondoodle]

lets reverse back into tloz for a bit, found a new totk rant video that almost exactly points out everything i hate about the game in a really easily understandable and entertaining way

[crazylittlejester]

DAILY BRAINROT

I got jump scared by a pedestrian on my way to get groceries because I was thinking about this, and I don't have a good excuse because I am also a pedestrian.

Adding a "half out of control ADHD" disclaimer on this one.

I have been seized by the brainrot, and it is holding me hostage until I finish writing out Legend and Wild meeting for the first time in the vigilante AU, and that's why the next chapter of poor Hyrule's fic hasn't been touched today.

Legend gets to be happy in this AU because I think he's earned it. He's been around for like... basically forever, so he gets to have all the friends he wants. I am aggressively improving his quality of life here. I went to the effort of finding him a sandwich recipe (and honestly might try it myself because it looks tasty).

Back to the point, which is that I was thinking about what powers everyone would have in this AU when I was going to get groceries. It's a very tough question, and the fact that my area of expertise in high school was Marvel is not helping because there are too many options to pick from. So I only managed to work out the abilities for two of the boys so far, which is half the reason why I'm making Wild and Legend play nice with each other today.

Long story short, I decided Wild should actually get a copy-and-paste ability AND I HAVE A GOOD REASON, OK. I love love love the idea that the Shrine of Resurrection's Sheikah Juice stuff is actually liquid information and since I can, I figured why not just replace his blood with it or something?? It's fanfiction I can do what I want. So now Wild has blue Shrine Juice blood and is sort of partly like a computer I guess, which means he has the ability to copy "files" and store them in his "system memory." Which... actually kind of explains the amnesia, I guess. Had to delete a few "files" (memories) to make space for the new "files" (abilities/powers). Obviously I've got to put a limit on him otherwise he'd be WAY TOO POWERFUL, so I'm thinking that each "file" either has a cool-down period of 1x every 24 hours or he has to pick 1 power to use for each 24-hour period. This explains how the Champions' gifts and the abilities from TotK work, and it makes me feel Very Smart.

Legend is actually pretty boring in comparison. I didn't really want to have to pick between his numerous items, so I gave him a very basic enhancement ability with an emphasis on speed and agility in the legs so he can run around on top of buildings and do parkour. His power isn't anything special, it's how he uses it that's actually interesting because he's had to make up for being Very Vanilla. It DOES let him keep up with most people, though, with few exceptions. And I like this because I think it kind of does reflect on how he's not really a special person by himself and that his being interesting comes from his experience and knowledge and inventory. He's the guy who's been everywhere, done everything, and knows everyone, and that's where a surprisingly large amount of his flavor comes from.

I have a rough idea for Sky, but I'm not completely sold on anything for him, yet (because of the whole deal with Demise and all). I'm extremely tempted to make him think he's a normal guy when he just uses his Terrifying Prophetic Abilities in his sleep. Like, he thinks he probably sleepwalks so he tells Twilight and Warriors when he moves in and the first week goes okay, but then for the second week he is walking in his sleep and doing Crazy Shit while spitting out Creepy Prophecies about stuff. It's concerning, and they're trying to figure out how to tell Sky to go to therapy because he is An Absolute Ray of Sunshine during the day. (Maybe he just has remlit powers?)

Legend gets to be happy in this AU because I think he's earned it <- OBSESSED WITH THIS.

COPY AND PASTE ABILITY. I LOVE IT.

REMLIT POWERS ALSKDKDKD

dude oh my GOD i fucking love all your au’s so much, the insane amount of detail you put in em???? I eat it up every goddamn time. thank you for bestowing upon me your brainrot every day 🙏

[drones-of-innocence]

✨, 🏷, and 📚 for the fanfic writing game! 😊

From this ask game:

✨️ Out of the comments you’ve received on your fics, what are two or three of your favorites?

I've gotten more than a fair share of comments in my time which is actually amazing haha, though it's usually the very long ones that stick with me and make me feel like I've written something impactful. The more detailed and invested in the little parts of the story a comment is, the more likely I am to remember it. Recently @keylovesstuff left a very long comment on I'll Never Let You Go on the most recent chapter. Another comment that comes to mind is @lotsofdreamb0ats comment on Fresh Air a couple of years ago that just completely blew me out of the water with their insight 🥺 Also you've actually left me many comments too and I always get very happy when I see your name in my notifs! In particular I remember this comment from you, also from Fresh Air 😆

I really do appreciate all the comments I get 🥹 It's such a pure form of kindness to leave a comment on any fic for an author and for so many people to take the time, especially multiple times, to let me know they liked something I wrote never gets old. Sometimes it is a little overwhelming, so I hope you'll forgive me if I've ever not replied to your comment. Just know that I probably speak for most authors (unless they explicitly say otherwise!!) that comments are always a welcome form of interaction, especially with developing stories as well as stories that are years old 💕

🏷 Is there a tag you like to search for when looking for fanfics to read?

I usually isolate fics with the romantic pairings I want to read about, and usually I stick to the canonical or almost canonical ones😆 I love Mario/Princess Peach (in case you couldn't tell), but I also enjoy various other ships as I interact with the media! Link/Zelda is one I come back to a lot (and have one or two fics partially written for) but I've had to stay away from the tag until I eventually finish TOTK to avoid spoilers 😩 I'll also read Adrien/Marinette from Miraculous Ladybug just because the secret identity dynamic is so fascinating. Sheeta/Pazu from Castle in the Sky is one I'll read for and have also written for. Pretty much any Ghibli pairing haha, the dynamics are always so pure and wholesome. Besides that, any media I consume with an interesting enough pairing is what I'll explore. I know these listed pairings are very hetero of me lol I do love me a good (healthy) masculine/feminine dynamic but I am actually in search of more queer pairings to explore. I have been slightly getting into podcasts and enjoying the queer representation in the Magnus Archives and Welcome to Night Vale.

📚 Is there a fanfic or fanfic writer you recommend?

I think the most fascinating author I've ever come across goes by YarningChick on Ao3 and FFN. They primarily write for The Cat Returns and the pairing of Haru/Baron Humbert von Gikkingen. The stories they write are so intricate and tied deeply into their other interests, essentially transforming the pairing into more or less their original characters in a sense. Some of the crossovers I never would have dreamed of, but the writer makes it all very compelling. I would 100% read any original story they wrote as well. I hope to be a writer like them one day.

Thank you so much for the ask!!

[symmetrycrypt]

totk spoilers/salt and i ended up rambling lol

another reason why totk is so frustrating to me is because, it's not that it's just bad, but it's so much wasted potential. i look at it and think about how they had so many interesting things they could have done more with; small changes that would have gone a long way in at least pissing me off significantly less. i still think totk's biggest downfall is that it's meant to be "a direct sequel" to botw, yet it doesn't want to actually commit, but even viewing it as a stand alone game without connecting it to botw, it's still so weak on its own. but even saying that, they could have done so much more with it?? if you're going to completely disregard the previous game anyway, go all the way and make the game/story better??

obviously, i know a lot goes into making a game, and i don't want to dismiss the hard work a lot of people did put into it, but the overall end product is just so bad and disappointing, especially to long time fans of the series. i had such high hopes for this game, and the more i played it, the more i just grew actually angry. the gameplay itself was increasingly frustrating and boring to me, and the story- god. i personally cannot understand the sentiment that totk's "story" is "better than botw's". like, it could have been..? but its presentation is so fucking bad, and every time i deluded myself into theorizing as i was playing and thinking a potentially interesting, good plot twist was coming, it was the most fucking predictably story ever, even by zelda standards

(fun fact(?): i could go more into detail about this on another post and how the game's insane choice of extreme "tell don't show" ruined what otherwise could have been a clever, significantly less irritating reveal with subtle, proper foreshadowing, BUUUUT, basically i predicted the entire Zelda becoming a dragon super early on in my first playthrough based on context clues due to my own observations and piecing things together, and i actually felt so smart about it (if i was going to end up being right). BUT, then i got one of the infamous memory scenes, and they bring up dRaCOniFiCaTion, and i was like "...oh, ok so like. this is obviously what's going to happen then, they just so obviously basically confirmed it right here."

BUT I HAD HOPE. I HAD HOPE THAT MAYBE IT WAS A RED HERRING AND ACTUALLY, SOMETHING ELSE WAS GOING TO HAPPEN. but i digress. basically the point is, the game does not trust you at all to piece things together, and what otherwise could have been a really good plot reveal that was properly and subtly foreshadowed that you very potentially could figure out all on your own, becomes the most predictable thing ever which then leads to even more predictability, (after the whole zelda dragon thing and swallowing secret stones 🙄,, i just knew the final fight was going to be a dragon ganon, and what do you know.... dbdjgbkjdf ALSO, someone else at the time was like "if that's true, i bet dragon Zelda's gonna come in and join the fight, and WHAT DO YOU KNOW..???

now, predictability in of itself isn't necessarily a bad thing (especially if foreshadowin and hints are properly laid out in the first place (WHICH THEY WERE)), but the problem is, again, the entire presentation of everything in totk and how EXTREMELY "tell don't show" it is, and it just made me really fucking hate the story even more.

i started rambling when i didn't mean to, and i don't even remember what the original point of this post was going to be, but i'll just stop it there for now fdkjndfkjnfd I still really need to make a post comparing my two different playthroughs and how purposely ignoring the memories really helped the game's narrative (though still not by much), but the game really tries to BEG you to go find them still, which is just another entirely baffling game design choice i just cannot comprehend, everything about the memories in totk are so poorly thought out, but i'm not going to ramble anymore for the time being

[rawliverandgoronspice]

From a different blog where I sent this as an anon ask: It feels like there were different writers for each section of the game, and none of them talked to each other, so they just kept the plot and story are barebones as possible. You also notice that Zora's domain had the worst writing in terms of continuity, and Rito had the best. The story Zelda goes through is just really confusing, and feels pointless because it goes in circles, it's like the writers had actually no idea what to do. I had talked to that blog owner for like a few weeks by then, and we'd come to the conclusion about why totk's story feels so... hamfisted and empty.

Hey!

So the thing is: it's generally how most AAA writing happens (at least in western settings, I think it's also how China tend to operate as well --but not so sure about Japan tbh, so take my reply with a grain of salt). You assemble a team of writers (sometimes they are also quest designer and/or level designers, sometimes they are separate people, it completely depends on the company and the project), you brief them on the general vision from the directors so you get a sense of what's the pitch/goal and what's the budget, and then you are assigned on either a questline, a character, or a "region" in open world games.

Then you are mostly on your own and very much funneled onto your specific tasks, and only tangientially in contact with what the other groups are doing. Sometimes you have to check on with them for either consistency, or to make sure what information you introduce when, or you need to double-check what the gameplay thing actually does... But the thing is, you generally see the full details of what the others have been working on pretty late. Sometimes you get companies that do writer's room and table readings where you get to workshop each other's work as it's being written/whiteboxed, but it doesn't happen systematically. Even with games that put on a lot of weight on their narrative being their strong suit!

(which is kind of dumb, we should 100% do that more just because... it's fun, it fosters trust and a sense of accomplishement and progress, people bond over the hardships, you get perspectives you wouldn't have gotten otherwise, and also it feels much better than having an overworked and/or stressed out editor/director flatten or rewrite everything without asking for your input at the last second :) :) :) )

So anyway! All of that jazz to say that it's a pretty common practice, and it hardly makes or breaks an open-world game usually. It will limit the amount of interconnection for sure, but generally never to the point that you reject the concept of interconnection and character writing altogether.

Which is why I feel like what's happening with TotK is more a case of... I don't know, an extremely, needlessly restrictive framing put in place from the beginning by directors/producers who were afraid of the complexity going out of hand and wanting to rely on BotW's workflow instead of figuring out a new one, and/or a case of the narration going out of hand while development happened, which led to a drastic simplification and rewriting pretty late in the production cycle. It's kind of my leading theory, one I'm partially basing on the fact that they used the COVID excuse when they said the game was going to be late, and I haven't heard of a single production that used the COVID excuse to justify a delay not having *major* problems under the hood --like it took maybe 2 weeks for the game industry to adjust to COVID, tops.

Again, it's speculation! I am pretty unfamiliar with how things are done in Japan when it comes to game production, so it might all be very biased in a bad way. But, just giving my two cents!

[jesuscrab]

Zelda TOTK makes me miss Death Stranding - an "analisis" (but not really)

Been playing the new hit Zelda game everyone been raving about, becuse i really loved the original. Been playing it for around 15 hours and i really do like it. But it keeps remidning me of Death Stranding, a game i've played for 200 hours last year. So i wanna write a little something descrining my problems with TOTK and my love for DS mechanics.

Read more to read more!!!

So. Death Stranding. Amazing game, at least to me. Not gonna bore you with the details, but it's a game that is fully designed on walking around - that is the main mechanics and gameplay feature - walking from point a to point b in the most efficent way possible. I have never realized how much of the games many mechanics are extremly well designed and thought out until now, when im playing a game without them. DS had so many unique and interesting mechanics that greatly improved exploration and navigation, things that i personally think TOTK has issues with.

The game has a very well designed map, which is not just a 2D png. It's a 3D model which you can tilt, showing you the topograhpy like valleys and mountains. It's a feature that greatly imporves navigation, which is for me a massive problem in TOTK.

It was a problem in BOTW already, but with the addition of sky island it became much more annoying. Putting waypoints on your map sucks. I can't make the point or stamp destinguish the "layer" where is it on, so future me will have to guess what i was trying to signal there. I can't know if a certian area is , becuse there is three seperate floating islands in the way, so i have to make sure each time that im stepping off the right one, since i can't easily check it on the map.

If i put the beacon from the map, it just goes on the highest point on the map, so fuck me if i forget what it was for and starting going on the top of some mountain becuse i could not highlight a cave otherwise.

TOTK just has a problem with navigation. A controversial way to help this would be imo to put a floating - sparkling "line" to your destination, which you could highlight from the map. Death Stranding let's you put a marker basiclly anywhere and it will show you the closest way there - but you can also connect markers yourself, drawing your own path on the map and plan your travels. I really would love a similar feature in TOTK, since i keep putting markers for myself in areas and then have a lot of trouble comming back there again. I love exploring stuff in games - thats why i love the new open world zelda - but this is not fun. It's annoying. They added new things in the game and didint put stuff to accomodate them.

A different thing i miss from death stranding is the compass - in my mind, a greatest open world mechanic idea (right below the self-drawn path i described earlier)

It basiclly just shows you all your markers and mission objectives, display the current distance, and allows you to snap your view dirrectly to them. That feature makes sense in DS since there is no minimap there, but still - i think zelda would benifit from a feature like that. with it's many attractions on the map, it's easy to get extremly sidetracked and even lost. even if i can see the waypoint on my map, it's still a flat png that just tells me the direction and nothing elese, i have no idea if it's in a mountain or a cave. And yes, i could look through the binoculars, but with their limited view they are not really a great navigation tool in my opinion.

I hope this revelation won't make me hate open world games or see them as worse. Death Stranding is a very different breed of an open world game, and i dont think every game should copy it. i just think that it's mechanics of travel are really good features and the new zelda - being a game based on exploration - would grealy benifit from features that improve them, since i think there are flaws in the system.

so ya. thats it. thanks if you read it all.]

play DS. My final messege... goodbye....

(sorry for not including pics - westy e slepy)

[ivasudevacharyauniverse-blog]

Patni Vashikaran Specialist | Wife Dispute Solution Powerful Mantra

New Post has been published on http://onlineloveastrologer.in/patni-vashikaran-specialist-wife-dispute-solution.html/

Patni Vashikaran Specialist | Wife Dispute Solution Powerful Mantra

Patni Vashikaran Specialist | Wife Dispute Solution Powerful Mantra

Patni Vashikaran Specialist | Wife Dispute Solution Powerful Mantra – Wife Vashikaran Powerful Mantra, The husband and the wife are the two allies of life. They must have a good relationship between them. A happy life depends upon their relationship and understanding. Such a relationship becomes the base of a happy family as well. The kids often follow their parents, and that is why they can always get some good inspiration from them.

Wife Vashikaran Powerful Mantra Wife Vashikaran Powerful Mantra

However, life is not smooth always and things do not happen as you wish. Things may change faster, and you may not like the change at all. It may create some difference between you are your wife. This is one situation that you need to handle very carefully indeed. You must try to handle the situation yourself. However, you are free to take other steps that may help you to put things right. You can think to use wife vashikaran powerful mantra.

What are the causes of disputes between husband and wife?

Literally, there can be many reasons for the disputes between husband and wife. Some of them are as follows:

Misunderstanding between them due to any valid or invalid reasons. The growth of an illicit relationship for them that involves them more passionately Disputes due to doubtful nature of the husband and wife Issues caused by other members of the family Use of harmful mantras that the people with ill-intentions often plant Some unknown reasons.

Patni Vashikaran Specialist | Wife Dispute Solution Powerful Mantra.

Why should people use Patni Vashikaran Mantra?

Usually, the wife becomes a strong rebel when she develops some misunderstanding with her husband. Moreover, she goes wayward if she develops a relationship with someone else. In such a situation, along with a few more, it becomes mandatory to use Patni vashikaran mantra. Following are a few reasons to use wife vashikaran powerful mantra:

Patni Vashikaran Specialist | Wife Dispute Solution Powerful Mantra

Use the mantra to control the temper of the wife Decide t use the Patni vashikaran mantra to take her back to order. She responds well to the influence of the mantra To remove all illusions from her mind that makes her develop the wrong relationship with her husband.

To get her back to your life in case she had gone out of your control. Influence her to withdraw the divorce case if she has filed a case against you. Importance of Using the Wife Vashikaran Totke:

Generally, the Patni vashikaran totke or the wife vashikaran powerful mantra brings immediate effect. Due to the fact that great mantras for controlling wife work faster, you can always think about using the mantra.

As a matter of fact, the Patni Vashikaran mantras work fast, and they have the power to solve all your problems you could not solve yourself. Most importantly, the vashikaran mantras work silently. They leave their effect almost immediately. Your wife would not feel the effect and things may get well soon for you.

Why Does It Become Necessary to Use the Wife Vashikaran Powerful Mantra?

Using the wife vashikaran powerful mantra becomes compulsory if the things go out of your control. Following are a few important conditions that make it needed to use the mantras:

Try the mantra when disputes reach sky high Use the Patni vashikaran mantra when your wife starts creating unbearable pains Make sure you use the mantra when disputes become a prestige issue for you Never hesitate to use the wife vashikaran powerful mantra when wife threatens for divorce

How to get the Best Wife Vashikaran Mantra?

Patni Vashikaran Specialist | Wife Dispute Solution Powerful Mantra – This is indeed a great question to answer. Usually, husbands cannot get the right mantra themselves. The mantras are available with the wife vashikaran specialist who is available almost everywhere. You may or may not know him. You can find the right specialist only if you follow the things as mentioned below:

You can ask for recommendations from your friends and relatives who may know them. Seek advice from the Internet.

Many reliable wife vashikaran specialists are available online. You can find them on the search engines like Google. You can even find their contacts on the newspaper and magazines. These publications have ads of the best wife vashikaran specialist on them. Many TV channels also telecast programs on such people. You can follow those channels and get their contact numbers and details. You can even reach them live when the program comes live on the channel.

Things to Consider While Hiring the Best Wife Vashikaran Specialist

Getting the services of the best wife vashikaran specialist is a critical job. You need to take care of many things while hiring the said specialist. Following are a few of them:

Do not hire a fraud as finding a true specialist is often not easy. However, it is impossible as well.

Conduct a survey before deciding the right specialist. Find reputation of the said specialist. Ask your friends, neighbors, and other associates. Never think about doing any harm to your wife. Otherwise, the mantras would not work. Since you love your wife, therefore you must never think about doing harm to her. Never leave the wife vashikaran specialist meet your wife alone.

How the Patni Vashikaran Mantra Works?

Usually, the Patni vashikaran mantra has a hypnotizing effect. The specialist tries the best mantra that he requires to control your wife. This is a critical task as it requires deep knowledge and practice. Usually, the mantra controls the brain of the wife and makes her unable to think.

The mantra makes her do whatever you want her to do. Under the effect of the wife vashikaran powerful mantra, your wife does what you instruct her to do. Virtually, she becomes a puppet.

Use of the right Patni vashikaran mantra is not always good as it may create some serious results in the end. Every family has some problems, and solving them is their responsibility. Make sure you try to solve the issues between yourself without using the tantrik activities of the wife vashikaran specialist. Be reasonable and continue to have faith in your love for your wife.

[ganondoodle]

Not gonna lie, the "It looks like a Divine Circle but is actually just hundreds of years of superstition & propaganda"-Concept is the coolest fucking thing I didn't know I needed until ten minutes ago. It's a super cool inversion of the classic trope, opens up a million possibilities for stories and arcs and on top of that, in game, you would obviously not know about it form the beginning but slowly have to collect clues and hints that things are not quite as everyone tells you.

So yeah, very cool concept!

Not directly related, but it's probably no surprise that my favorite Ganondorf line is the "I coveted that Wind"-line from the finale of Wind Waker. He doesn't even go into detail, cause he doesn't have to, this line alone instantly humanizes him. Like, its the end of the game, we are about to fight him, there is no way this will not end in a fight, and yet, at that point, that line, just goes so fucking hard. Because you instantly know what he's talking about, that he simply wanted a future for his people, which, you know, is a very human thing to do. It wont stop us from fighting him here and now, way too much has happened for that, but it reminds us, the audience, that he has motives and reasons and thoughts and is an actual character.

So yeah, in case it's not obvious yet, I too despise the extremely flat "I'm evil because evil, waaaaaaaaagh!" Ganondorf from TOTK. Why even include him if you cant be arsed to actually write him?

Anyways, last thing, I'll have to somewhat disagree on the Gameplay vs Story thing, at least partially because I work in the field and have had experiences with this problem myself. Not saying its impossible to have both, but its a lot more difficult than one would expect.

Towards your point, yes a good story can pull people through a game, but so can strong gameplay. Take the Doom games, I dont really care about their story, but the gameplay is great. On the other hand, the gameplay of the average Telltale game would be incredibly boring without the story behind it. There are hybrids, but even they tend to lean one way or the other: The Assassins Creed or Uncharted Series have solid and fun gameplay, but would probably get repetitive or boring if we didn't have strong characters and stories that keep us interested. And all of that is before you consider that there are different player types that gravitate to one or the other and it gets even more complicated. (There's more to this but I my thoughts on the topic could easily be a full bachelors Thesis, so I'll stop here.)

I should add that I dont think that the gameplay over story (or vice versa) argument can or should be used to defend games or design choices. Yes, Nintendo does prefer to focus on Gameplay over Story. Does that mean we shouldn't expect a good story, or are not allowed to criticize a bad one in their games? Hell no! (And if my previous ask sounded like I was doing that, I apologize, that was NOT what I meant to say! I'll happily critique all of TOTKs flaws, both in gameplay & story, otherwise how can we learn from it?)

This argument can be used to understand and analyze or interpret design decisions but it shouldn't ever be used to defend them. Just like the "just for kids" argument, by using such arguments, the person in question basically admits that they are aware of the weaknesses and faults in their story/game/whatever but didn't fix or improve them. So yeah, I do agree with you on that front 100%, hiding behind such arguments is a problem.

Anyway, sorry for leaving another wall of text in your inbox, hope you're having a nice day!

thank you! that 'cycle' concept is also what destiny (zelda comic) is based on, since it takes place before skyward sword you get to see the set up for it, and, in this story, the gods have been trying to achieve it countless times, throughout the story of it its supposed to slowly be revealed- like demise already knowing some parts since hes yet another 'failed' version of that plan (im reusing that concept for the totk rewrite as well bc i am very original wahoo)

oh you work in that field! thats cool!! yeah my opinion on this sort of thing is very much a thing i formed bc i play games, though i still dream of gamedev, i guess i understood your mention of it a little too much into the dismissive argument way (though not as an attack) and its been repeated so so many times i cant help but get a little >_> at it; the point i was trying to make was more like ... they need to find a balance with it, like you can make it all about gameplay, but then dont pretend you have the most epicest story that ever storied, maybe even do it less or more subtle, like the fromsoft game i feel like are very well balanced in that regard, bc their lore and story is very neat and intertwined, but you have to look and think to get it, and the gameplay is strong on its own so much so that it kinda ends up being both soemthing for people that dont care about lore and those that do, more than about the gameplay

zelda feels like it doesnt quite know what to do (even moreso modern zelda), bc they prioritize the gameplay but then still put in a story that they want understood .. so its like, babiefied? like there is a "simple" story and its few points are repeated into your face over and over and over so the people that dont care to read into soemthing GET IT but also annoy them, bc they dont care anyway, and the people who care about lore/story above gameplay are bored bc the narrative isnt engaging enough and they dont care as much about the gameplay

especially so with totk i think, its so weird, botw wasnt like that imo, it wasnt overly complicated either but at least it left you wondering, and let you think, the more you thought about the more interesting it was (at least to me) totk feels like the opposite, it doesnt want you to think, bc the more you think about it the more it falls apart and makes less sense

like theres types of games that focus HARD on one or the other (like slay the princess for example, its like an interactive audio book, there isnt much gameplay but it goes hard on narrative), so obviously the balance of gameplay and story isnt applicable to every game, but for zelda in particular they say they are one but then still want the other part just as much? like the lore in skyward sword isnt great, the characters are strong though, the gameplay isnt that engaging (to me, since that needs to be said) i got through it mostly just bc i wanted to see what comes next and liked the characters, in botw the freedom and world and gameplay were like nothign i ever experienced, exploring was addictive and the story took a bit of a backseat, but it was fitting for the game and lend itself so well to theorize, in totk they .. idk what the focus was, the .. glue? the toys to glue together? nothing fits together there and each part works against another instead of together, somehow, its so weird to me

the thing is, if you do gameplay over story, you need to roll with it? if thats what it is then let the story take a backseat, make it subtle and in the background or vague, dont stuff the game full of unskippable cutscenes where a character you dont care about explains you a thing you already figured out through the gameplay; like the zelda dragon point, let the design of the dragon and its music, what its carrying speak for itself, the way the deku tree is weirded out by the sword moving, maybe a quick subtle voice line once you get the sword fading away like the last parts of her soul being whispered away- but dont mention it in one of the first cutscenes, fail to bury it in 'thats illegal though and irreversible so nono dont you do it' (why mention it then huh) allude to it multiple times, and then just straight up show it (i get people like the scene but man, it would have been way cooler to figure it out yourself)

same goes for the fake zelda thing, the weird way she said the bloodmoon text already alluded to it, have her show up here and there but vanish before you (no "omg thats zelda omg what is she dooooing") , or go even harder and make her an NPC standing around the world interacting with you all nromally but animals react weirldy to her- make the midfight against her (maybe even that she isnt talking so you are unsure if its actually her but controlled by sth else, or talk all normally while literally going for your throat) and then have her dissolve into goop and woa the bloodmoon thing is without her now the zelda you have been talking to has been fake the whole time, its creepy!! leave out the stupid cutscenes of showing it multiple times!! stop monologing at me!!

ppl that dont care about it can go and do a fight and i can think about it! everyone wins yahoo!

(actually ... if you leave out all the cutscenes in totk i feel like it improves the game by alot ...)

(what my point in the previous thing was in the end that you can repeat the same old trope only so many times without changing anything before it gets boring as hell, like what you said here, and the series seems to really be setting itself on fire bc it just wants to do the trope of old so badly and at some point its gonna drag down even the best of gameplays like gameplay over story means (to me) gameplay is prioritized so whatever narrative there is is in the background, subtle and not overtly in your face with big cutscenes etc- but what i feel like its often supposed to mean is "its fine if theres a shitty story that makes no sense pasted on top bc they prioritize gameplay so stop complaining" like to me what it should mean is more gameplay, less story, a measure of quantity not of quality, but what i feel like it often means is better gameplay, bad story, a measure of quality, not quantity )

maybe my problem lies elsewhere and im just projecting it on gameplay > story, that could very much be the case, i could have a fundamental missunderstanding about this here, im still just a guy with opinions in the end and got no knowledge about anything other than i play games sometimes and these are the things i like and dislike and would do differently *puts my head in my hands*

idk if im making sense, im usually not very good at explaining how i feel or think :/ (or i THINK im bad at it, autism be damned)

(sorry this got so long again ......................)