#put my rant under the cut bc I'm so shy about putting out long posts lol

[charbies]

I'm mashing together my review of totk and reactions to random encounters with the masterworks I've had lately into one stream of consciousness

Totk should have had true continuity, not a 6 year time skip that we never get to see, experience, and feel. It's not that hard to bridge 2 games with a 1-2 min cutscene, esp in a zelda game. Majora's mask starts with quick, but meaningful exposition that bridges OOT to MM! The intro to wind waker is a 6 minute long cutscene!! This series thrives with its detailed, intriguing intros, so what happened?? Before I even launched totk the night it came out, I booted up botw and replayed the final boss & ending because I was so stoked to see the transition in story/world and wanted to honor both games. Instead boom, we're walking in a cave w/ no context.

I was so disappointed that zelda wasn't a companion character to link in totk, it was disempowering to her character arc. Really thought this game would build off of botw's snippets of link & zelda working together in memories. The teasers and trailers for totk gave this perception that she would be there (which would also "break tradition" like devs wanted, ffs). When I was on the tutorial island I was fully convinced I'd be finding her and we'd reconvene like "ok what's next." When I realized 20 mins into the game that she was GONE gone, as in will not reappear likely until the end of the game damsel-in-distress-style, my verbatim thought "wait... really? Is this still going to be good?" Which was kinda sad, for a game I waited so many years for :/

I had major pet peeves with the copy/paste nature of the cutscenes with the old sages. The dialogue, bgs, pacing, literally all identical. They just hot swapped the character models for the sages and said that was good enough, wtf!!! I live for cutscenes in games, I have since I was like 5. This felt lazy, and seriously demotivated me from completing the dungeons bc I knew there was going to be nothing novel or intriguing to look forward to

The secret stones were gimmicky af. Sorry. Also stupid name, they couldn't even opt for "sacred?" Ik in other languages they have way cooler names, which would have helped. Link's fucking thanos glove of stones was a stupid gimmick, I cannot believe they didn't think to alter that concept to be more mythical, or creative, or just original. I would have killed for the stones to relate to the triforce in some way, or to do away with the stones and have this game connect to the triforce, since the whole direction of this story was going back to ancient myth & lore.

the Zonai lacked depth, and honestly just felt like a boring distraction even tho they were supposed to be a central focus of this game. I 1000% agree with other folks posts on the take that rauru was a flat, 2-dimensional colonizer. Sonia got sidelined. yikes. ew. no thanks.

^similarly, ganon really was given no character or depth imo. It's like they did a fantastic job making him visibly LOOK scary, so they didn't bother to give him motives beyond "I'm bad, I do what I want."

the cliche "back to normal" at the end irked me. Link could have come out with no arm, keeping the zonia arm, or at least scars w/ the zonai arm pattern and that would be meaningful. Zelda got factory reset from irreversible draconification in a method that for all intents and purposes, could have been done as soon as link got rewind ability. There was no investigation or inclusion of the other dragons, which seemed like a missed opportunity. Actively working on reversing her could have been a main quest in game!! Like 1. Complete all dungeons/get all stones, 2. you can now go round up the spirits of rauru & sonia and reverse zelda yippee, 3. you and zelda go beat the shit out of ganon together. The dragons fighting was beautiful, powerful imagery, but honestly I think too much potential was traded away just to execute that one fraction of the boss fight.

The masterworks book annoys me, which is sad bc I love concept art. I wanted to be a concept artist growing up, I can accept that you'll often see things that never make it into the final cut. I was enamored with early posts abt things like zelda's haircut, char designs, etc.

But more recently I'm seeing the anthology side of the book taking major liberties that it didn't even bother showing us directly or alluding to in the game, and I think that's such a cop-out. They are literally telling us instead of SHOWING us in the game they release a year ago, and spent SIX YEARS making. There was a festival celebrating the return of zelda/defeat of ganon?? Freaking show us that!!! Show us link & zelda acclimate to post-calamity life. Show us imperfect, non-linear healing and resilience. I would have loved a festival scene w/ link and zelda that conveys the nuance of celebration and recognition of their efforts, and the contrasting weight of what they went through. Show me zelda, exhausted after a festival struggling with guilt and indecision about whether to bring back the monarchy with hyrule's restoration. Throwing in a "oh btw imagine if we actually had done this" post-game makes me so irritated and feral. It's like the post-release canon is sidling up to fanon and saying, "hey look we can do that too! look at our fan art" idk if that makes sense, I don't think I'm explaining it well. But it just feels disingenuous.

I'm not a timeline purest, I don't need everything to interconnect, but I don't love how assertions in this book invalidate connections and lore of other games. Also really don't love how this game overwrites and sidelines the sheikah.

I know majority of my disappointment stems from my own, personal expectations of a game that, let's face it, was probably given many mandates and initiatives to appeal to *everyone* in broad, lackluster ways. I still love the world and characters of zelda, if anything, totk reaffirmed what I love and want to prioritize in my art that I didn't see present in this game. Fun fact I used the world of botw to learn a lot about drawing landscapes & composition. It actually inspires me a bit to try to learn to do comics, which has been a longtime goal I've been too busy and/or timid to pursue lol.

mmm anyway if u read this and any of this resonated DM me and lets froth at the mouth and commiserate lol