#the colgera fight makes the all handholding at the start worth it

[arkon-z]

A very interesting thing I just realized about Tears of the Kingdom vs Breath of the Wild (yes, I'm on about this again):

They're both open world games, but I think BOTW does it better than TOTK. Or, more accurately, TOTK wanted/tried to be a lot more linear, but didn't quite pull it off. The game doesn't lock you on a specific path, but it definitely has one and things can get awkward if you don't follow it. Like, if you've played it, you know it really pushes you to go to Rito Village first, even though you can go anywhere you want. You don't need Tulin's Gust to do everything else, but since a third of the game is in the sky, it's hard to get around without it.

It's more obvious with the Dragon Tear memories. You're obviously supposed to get them in a specific order so that the story they're telling makes sense. But if you just find one randomly while exploring, you'll get a scene that's way out of context and you might get spoiled for later events. That happened to me, actually. I saw the blood moon memory before the betrayal scene. Easy enough to figure out from context what was happening, but it was kind of disappointing to see it in the wrong order. Not that I didn't know what was coming - if you've ever played a Zelda game, you know what Ganondorf is about.

In BOTW, it didn't matter that you could get the memories out of order, because they weren't building off of each other the way the Dragon Tears were. The BOTW memories are telling a story, but they're disjointed and only loosely connected to each other. And because you are playing as an amnesiac trying to put his memory back together, the fact that they feel so disjointed is part of the experience. They're clearly missing a ton of context (which you as the player can easily infer as you find more memories), but aren't dependent on each other to convey the message contained in each one.

As i've said before, TOTK's script would have benefited from another pass or two before release. I think it tried too hard to please all the fans and the story (and other parts) suffered as a result. Trying to introduce some strong linear elements in a game and setting not known for its linearity is a choice for sure, and might have worked if they'd tried a little harder.