#totk salt

[arkon-z]

Did Fake!Zelda add anything to the TOTK story? She was running around causing trouble in Hyrule*, but why, exactly? To discredit her? To raise the stakes? "She summoned the monsters!" Okay, and? They could have popped up on their own as a result of the leaking Gloom. We knew she was a fake the moment she appeared. And yeah, no one else did, but the fact that Link knew it wasn't her felt like a really lazy example of dramatic irony.

More importantly, what was it building up to? Cartoonishly evil Zelda shows up as set dressing for a dramatic fight with...Phantom Ganon. It was for nothing! I think they just had her tangentially involved with the plot as more fan service. And you know what? They still could have made it work better with just a bit more polish! Zelda shows up, does something out of character and Link could've reacted! They're all falling for her act but he's the one convincing them it's not her. Even that would have been interesting. All they had to do was give him a couple of dialog boxes with a single choice.

"Man, why is the princess acting like this? I thought she wanted to help us."

>That's not her!

"What? Are you serious? That's really not her?"

>She would never act like that!

*The fact people kept falling for it kind of annoyed me - Zelda had spent the last few years helping people and rebuilding Hyrule. They should have known she was acting out of character.

[smilesrobotlover]

Gosh I hate how insanely powerful Ganondorf is in totk. You’re telling me this guy, who we rarely see his actual magical capabilities, is so powerful with a secret stone that 4 people who have used the secret stones for much longer than he and four additional people with the secret stones can’t defeat him??? He’s that strong??? He’s stronger than the master sword that is the most powerful weapon out there??? Just cuz he has the measly little secret stone?? Are you kidding me?

What’s most frustrating about this is that if they JUST added the Triforce it’d fix EVERYTHING. If Ganondorf had the Triforce of power I would TOTALLY believe that he would be THAT powerful because the Triforce is the most powerful thing on that entire planet and it gave previous ganondorfs all their power. And so yeah the secret stone would amplify his power ten-fold and so it makes sense that he’d be nearly unstoppable! But NOOOOO they didn’t add the Triforce and fixed that very fixable plot hole for some reason. Good grief

[mememan93]

Ok, I have a possibly controversial take.

I am not a fan of the precedent set by breath of the wild and age of calamity that has been continued by tears of the kingdom and now age of imprisonment. That precedent being not fully telling the story the first time around, and releasing a spin off to tell the story that should've been there the first time.

Now I love warriors gameplay, i have over 500 hours in the original HW (combining 3DS and switch), I don't have an issue with warrior spin offs, actually, i was hoping for hyrule warriors 2 (like, sequel to the OG with more characters) myself. but the problem is in the story component.

Both botw and totk tell their stories in a fragmented way. You find 30 second cutscenes in the open world. For botw this made sense, link is an amnesiac. But for totk, it made less sense, and people were a little annoyed that we barely got to see zelda. Sure, they're open world games, but there are ways to tell stories in those games without resorting to a scavenger hunt.

Zelda sort of took a backseat in tears, you could see bits of her adventures, but without a lot of context for the most part. This is something people wanted to see in tears, some people even wanted to play it.

So now you can play it, for an extra $60.

This spin off reliance honestly weakens both games. You don't include it in totk so some pp think the story is mid. Now you include it in a spin off, but you have failed to make me and other people interested in it, so we don't care about the spin off.

And yes i know, other game companies do this all the time and it is equally as shitty when they do it.

And if age of calamity is anything to go by, i'm betting they don't commit to a final losing battle. If they do i'll be surprised and applaud it, but i have heavy doubts. I don't think we'll get to see the same big moments from totk, such as the dragonification scene.

So, basically, while i hope this game is fun, i hope they stop relegating the story to another full priced game, and integrate the stories to the original games better

[blue-likethebird]

Reusing the memory system from botw for the tears of the dragon storyline in totk was such a terrible decision on so many different levels that it’s honestly kind of impressive.

While the botw memory system had flaws of its own, there was one small but significant thing that worked in its favour: botw’s memories were largely separate from the main plot in the past, and have absolutely no bearing on the story being told in the present. Aside from a few specific instances (ie the calamity striking, the ceremony, Link and Zelda becoming closer) the memories are all self-contained moments that emphasize character development over driving the story. Because there’s no major narrative throughline between them, it gives players more freedom to discover in any order regardless of how much they’ve progressed through the main quest without running the risk of stumbling across a memory that ruins something else later on in the game.

(This got long so the rest of my analysis is going under the cut.)

The biggest change between the memories from botw and the dragon’s tears from totk is definitely what kind of information these cutscenes relay to you as the player. Botw’s memories are primarily snapshots of small interpersonal moments that hold very little significance to the greater narrative taking place in the past. Totk’s memories are the greater narrative. With only one major exception -that I’ll touch on in a sec-, every cutscene in the dragon’s tears shows a crucial moment of story development with no time left to explore the characters driving that story forwards. There’s no organic moment revealing, say, a quirk of Rauru’s that Mineru finds annoying, or Sonia’s sense of humour, or any of our literal Main Villain Ganondorf’s motivations for going to war with Hyrule. If there’s any moments of character focus they only happen in ways that advance the plot (meaning the only real character focus is on the characters totk wants the entire universe to orbit around, namely Rauru and Zelda), and as such it’s harder to bring myself to care about what happens to anyone.

To illustrate the point I’m trying to make here, compare the memories of the champions Link regains during the divine beast quests to the conversations with the ancient sages at the end of each temple. The memories make passing mentions of the ongoing preparations for the calamity, but the real purpose of those scenes is to showcase who the champions were as people before their deaths and give us a reason to mourn them, even though we know at the start of our journey that they’re all long gone. In contrast, the conversations with the ancient sages are all about the events of the imprisoning war and their promise to Zelda that their descendants will come to Link’s aid in the future, very obviously copy pasted for each of the five times that cutscene is brought up (which is a particularly egregious moment of bad quest design but that’s a rant for another time) in such a way that none of the 5 incarnations of that cutscene reveal anything new about the ancient sages as characters, to the point where none of them even show their faces. I care about Daruk because the game shows me that he cares deeply about the wellbeing of his fellow champions and brings out the best in others. So why should I care about the nameless, faceless sage of water? What’s there to move me about their struggles if my only interactions with the sages are a series of exposition dumps? If the game can’t give me a reason to sincerely care about its main characters, the whole rest of the story is meaningless.

(As an aside, I get the feeling someone on the dev team caught on to the issue I’m describing here, because the tea party memory sticks out like a sore thumb from the rest of the dragon tear cutscenes. It’s such a jarring change of pace to have the otherwise plot-heavy dragon’s tears come screeching to a halt for a scene where Sonia sits down with Zelda to have a cute little tea party and talk about absolutely nothing of significance that the whole thing almost seems like it was hastily tacked on to the story later. Given that the next (chronological) memory sees Sonia fall victim to an unceremonious death by chiropractor, it feels like someone realized that Sonia really doesn’t do or say much in the scenes before she dies and threw together the tea party scene so players would have at least one moment to look back on fondly when she’s fridged. But I digress)

The story told in the dragon’s tears is a highly linear one. But the open-ended nature of botw’s memory system remains, meaning that these tears can be found and viewed in any order. At first this doesn’t seem so bad, since the first two tears you’re likely to find if you follow the game’s intended path are also the chronological first and second of the memories you can discover through these geoglyph tears. But after those first two, the game kinda gives up on guiding you towards these tears in a way that flows well with the story they wrote: the closest tear geographically to the two the game initially guides you towards correlates to one of the penultimate scenes of that entire storyline, while the next scene chronologically is found almost halfway across the map. As such, it’s all but guaranteed that you’ll spoil yourself in some way without using either a guide or the (somewhat unintuitive and never fully explained by the game) little map in the forgotten temple. Finding memories in order didn’t matter so much in botw because the scenes you could find still worked well as standalone scenes before you discovered every memory and pieced together the full picture, and the game is never trying to surprise me about the characters’ fates at the end of this storyline: hell the first memory you’re guided to shows the calamity striking. But in contrast, viewing a dragon’s tear at the wrong time can completely ruin the story they’re trying to tell in those cutscenes. During my playthrough, for example, the first tear I found after the game stopped guiding me to them showed Ganondorf removing Sonia’s stone from her dead body. At this point I had known Sonia existed for all of like an hour, so every subsequent appearance she made was ruined for me by the fact that I already knew she was nothing but cannon fodder to be killed off for the sake of another character’s pain (Rauru and Zelda a-fucking-gain). I expected to be pissed that it was so easy to spoil myself, or maybe sad in passing that a character with her potential was so underutilized, but instead I just felt… tired. I wasn’t even halfway to the first settlement and already I was completely numb to the story the game was trying to tell.

But the worst was yet to come. And oh boy was it ever a low point for storytelling in the Zelda series. Remember how I said up above that the memories in botw had no connection to the story in the present? Let’s just say the same cannot be said for the dragon’s tears.

It’s May 2023. I’ve just finished the sage of wind questline. I still have hope that the story the game is trying to tell will be good. Deciding that I’ll go to Goron city next, I head towards the Thyplo skyview tower to expand my map, catch a glimpse of a nearby geoglyph from the air, and glide over to check it out. This geoglyph shows me a memory that not only recaps the entire dragon tear storyline, but also ends on a bit of foreshadowing about Zelda’s fate that’s about as subtle as a brick to the fucking face. By exploring -the thing the game claims it prioritized above all else in the design of its world and quests- I’d once again been hit with spoilers for a major story detail.

My main objective in this game is to find Zelda. It’s the only driving factor behind my journey towards all these different regions. The current big mystery I’m supposed to solve is why Zelda’s causing so much hell for the people of Hyrule. I now knew exactly where she was and what the deal with her appearances in other parts of Hyrule was, and I’d found it completely by accident by doing something the game says over and over again that it wants me to do. Unlike with Sonia’s death, this time I was a mess of emotions. I was pissed the fuck off that this open-world game had punished me twice already for trying to explore. More than that, I was disappointed that a game I had been so excited to play, from a series I had so many fond memories of, had let me down like this. With every subsequent quest where the sages and I chased a Zelda I knew was fake to our next objective, and every NPC wondering where she was that I couldn’t tell the truth to, that disappointment grew. The entire rest of the main story was ruined for me before I had progressed past 1/4th of the regional quests and a third of the dragon’s tears. There was no more sense of anticipation or mystery. I finished the rest of the game with a bitter taste in my mouth and haven’t touched it again since.

Do I think this story could have been good? Honestly, I don’t know, and by now I don’t really care either (that’s a lie. I care so so much and that’s probably why I hate totk as much as I do). But it’s all irrelevant, because like Cinderella’s stepsister cutting off her own heel so she can cram her foot into a glass slipper that’s never going to fit, totk is sabotaged by the devs’ insistence that everything fit itself into a world they custom-made for botw. This isn’t a new formula that the series is following, it’s Nintendo slapping a new coat of paint on an existing skeleton, and I’m not optimistic to see what this particular approach has in store for the Zelda series. Especially not at the price they’re charging for it.

[eggman-1]

Every NPC talking about pirates in Lurien village and stuff got my hopes up abt actual pirates. but of course it was just bokoblins

[theclam-beforethestorm]

Anyone else still really fucking bitter TOTK replaced Teba with Tulin? Like, I don't hate Tulin, I think he's neat, I just really wish we didn't get more of him at the expense of Teba.

[gensnix]

Notice how botw and totk don't have a line that connects them like the other games

[symmetrycrypt]

the only thing that can save Age of Imprisonment is if they make the bold and sexy move of making my original Evil Sonia theory come true

[dumpster-lizard]

10,000 years between the original calamity and BOTW is stupid. 10,000 years ago on earth was Mesopotamia. 10,000 years ago we were just starting to domesticate goats. The earliest signs of civilization along the Nile River was 8000 years ago (about 6000 BCE). The PYRAMIDS were built nearly 4000 years after that. The Green Sahara (African Humid period) was estimated to have ended 6000-5000 years ago.

That is an insane amount of time, for comparatively very little change. And this is expected to take place long after the "original" timeline, and the Zonai period. Even for a fantasy series, that's pushing it.

Meanwhile 1000 years ago was the middle ages. The Holy Roman Empire. The Song dynasty. Still a LOT of change between then and now.

Anyway I'm choosing to ignore canon on this and assume that 10,000 years is an in universe mistranslation. For my own sanity

[snail-studios]

damn. the one time they make a character with dark skin who isn't the villain or fetishised to high heaven they have to whitewash her in their twitter posts

[clockwise-works]

If TotK had any sauce they would've given Link a corruption arc.

[smilesrobotlover]

Everyone says that totk hates women and stuff but honestly totk is just bad at writing characters in general

[waywardsalt]

bc its been bouncing around in my head i think another little tiny grievance i had with totk is that i got to the end and just felt a sense of ‘well what the hell was that all for then’

[blue-likethebird]

Something I find irritating about the minor resurgence in discourse about totk's story and its ideological standings is the argument that Zelda games have always had uncompromising black and white morality, so any criticism of Hyrule/Rauru/Sonia is inherently futile.

That's not entirely correct. It's true that Zelda games have fairly obvious good guys and bad guys, but plenty of Zelda games have touched on the flaws of Hyrule's monarchy. For example, there's the Shadow temple and bottom of the well from OoT, the twilight realm from TP, BotW's pre-calamity flashbacks, basically all of windwaker's final act, etc. Even Skyward Sword -and as much as I love that game it does have some unfortunate 'divine right of kings' implications to it- is more critical of Hylia's plan and the effect it has on the people involved than anything totk's cast can muster up about Rauru. Zelda games having simple stories that their intended audience can grasp doesn't mean that they haven't at least attempted to touch on more complicated moral questions in the past.

I can't speak for everyone but I and most other people I see in the totk critical tags don't mean I want this children's game to provide a definitive critique of divinely-ordained monarchy when I discuss Ganondorf's complete lack of motivations or the story's refusal to question Rauru's leadership the way previous games questioned Rhoam, Daphnes, or Hylia. I know Nintendo aren't gonna bother fitting a scholarly review of fantasy imperialism between the archery and bowling minigames, but I'd be more willing to accept that if they would at least give the central narrative a shred of nuance or staying power in return.

[eggman-1]

*sigh*

I will reserve my judgements until the game comes out but you screw up the story the first time then charge the price of a new game (which according to reports may be $80? more then totk was??) to try and fix it?? Please nintendo, explode.

[mememan93]

Im sorry but i can't stand totks new lore. I do not like the zonai. Rauru and Mineru's designs are cool, but also. I'm sorry i hate their addition to the lore of the series.