#my korok siblings who fell into the depths are suffering

[shootingcookielover]

I think the legend of zelda: tears of the kingdom should have played out like:

U get the ganondorf cutscene, the mastersword breaks, link looses his arm.

The ground rumbles and breaks, earth starts rising - but only link falls off the chunk. Zelda reaches for him, their hands just miss and Link disappears into the darkness below.

Now, Zelda does not inexplicably timetravel into the past.

Instead she wakes up on a sky island as a playable character.

She meets Rauru's ghost and with his help, plus help from some constructs, she manages to repurpose the sheikah slate to have basically the same abilities as the zonai arm in totk.

At some point during this, maybe after a particularly harrowing temple or something, I dont know, we find a campfire. Rauru's sat there, like, meditating or smth, and tells zelda to take a break and wait, since that is really the best option they right now - wait for a rito to fly high enough that they see zelda. Or something, idk, point is we need a reason for zelda to chill at a campfire.

Because this introduces the switching mechanic - aka, not only can u forward time at a campfire, but u can also change perspectives. In this case, to Link.

Link who is just. Not having a good time lol.

He wakes up in the depths, alone, no weapons, the malice eating his arm draining away the lives that players painstakingly built up in breath of the wild.

Everythkng's dark. Monsters are seemingly everywhere, pools of malice are threatening to kill you even faster than your broken arm already does.

All you have for a glimmer of hope is faint turquoise light somewhere ahead. So that's where ur heading.

This is where u find rauru's arm, fallen with some other debris, around a non-actjve light root.

Link somehow manages to attach the arm to the one still eaten by malice - idk maybe u pick up the arm, there's a fade to black, and when it returns it's to link bending his new and improved blue-glowing fingers experimentally.

You activate the lightroot and it restores some of ur hearts, but not the entirety of what u once had - a symptom of the malice-eating arm, or smth, surely.

And now u have two different story lines going at once - zelda tryjng to find link/figure out what's going on/stop ganondorf by exploring the sky islands, maybe having access to hyrule below with the help of some rito that u can find scattered across the sky islands. Maybe there's even a skysard sword-type skybird element there, where u get to steer the rito or smth, idk.

Meanwhile in the depths u have link, building up a shelter/hq/base with people that somehow fell into the chasms as they opened up, nobody quite able to reach the top again - not even the few rito that fell down. They just can't make it through the thick miasma of malice hanging above everything like storm clouds.

And, of course, link is also trying to get back to zelda/figure out what's going on/stop ganondorf.

Like idk, i feel like going with an approach like this would have made totk feel less like just a re-packaged botw with some DLC content, you know?

But hey, what do i know, i'm just some guy lol