Good story, memorable music and linear, or at least stronger, plot direction

My biggest problem was the ending, they have this long, arduous cutscene that acts as a farewell to Mineru, a character we saw in 3 cutscenes and was the last sage we got in the present. My theory is that she was meant to be a companion character at some point, being a voice that speaks to you through the Purah Pad while having amnesia or something so the reveal feels more natural. Chances are, it was scrapped for some reason or another, so her soul was just dormant in the Purah Pad until it was convenient to the plot. Zelda has always had legendary stories, BoTW left me wanting but did it's own thing, ToTK just feels half-baked and like it doesn't even do BoTW's story justice.

Yeah he kinda right with that title after the 64 title each over world kinda got bigger and bigger over the course of series dang when I play wind waker for the first I was kinda overwhelm how big the over world was compared to ocerina of time

The thing that kills BOTW/TOTK combat is how samey all the weapons feel. The bouncy hammer, Master Sword, a stick, and a wand all have the same exact animations and timing. Sure they do something different when you hit an enemy, but like *gestures back at fromsoft* A scimitar, short sword, dagger, etc. will have their own unique animations and timings as well as the unique properties. The big thing that killed me was that poleaxes are my favorite weapons in media and seeing link wield it the same as a mop, javelin, long stick, or pike was so disappointing. Link is sitting there stabbing with a glaive/halberd and my soul is screaming about how those are edged weapons and should be sliced with.

Windwaker has 6 dungeons if you count the forbidden fortress, dragon roost, the forbidden woods, tower of the gods, wind temple and earth temple. 7 if you for some reason count ganons tower on the surface world.

Great video sir. On point.

I think they Should have matured a bit. You can clearly see they didn‘t like how MM was so dark and Moody because it was developed in one year because they Never did it again and Even „fixed“ it in the 3d Version (Thatswhy I think n64 Version is peak). It would be great to have a Zelda with the openworld of Totk, a darker but also reasonable dark( Not edgy dark) Tone, Dungeons like MM or TP and exploring like a Metroidvania. And Non breakable Weapons, this mechanik sucks ass!

Cook bro

Justice for spirit tracks fr fr

Its the first time I havent played a core Zelda game. I just cant get into them at all. ... BanjokazooieZelda nuts an bolts addition.

I love how you edited yourself in different spots throughout the entire video, it was refreshing to watch, good video, definitely have similar feelings in regards to that curated artpiece vs the make it yourself deal, it's like going from a 5 star restaurant to being sent to it's kitchen, sure you might have all the same ingredients that they use, but unless you know how to cook as well as the people who've been trained to make that dish, that curated experience, it's not gonna be as good.

You're a material girl... you want to unlock cool items... I think what you're missing from both botw and totk is a sense of progress. Previous zeldas locked you into set objectives that adavanced the story and the expand the area that you could explore. You got new abilities, there was a sense that your actions were going somewhere, as the story and setpieces build on each other to a climax. Your actions were cumulative and there was a sense of purpose. Botw and totk completely lack this; since you could beat the final boss right from the get go, a lot of what you do in game doesn't feel like it matters beyond just having higher stats. Even something like clearing a dungeon and solving a region's problems feels like a disappointing blip as really, you don't have to do this and it makes no difference in the end. You just fucked around in a sandbox for a few hundred hours. Tho calling the wild era games junk food is misleading. Botw and totk are the most complex and mechanically interesting games in the series. There's room for player growth that outpaces any other game in the franchise. Fucking around in that sandbox for hundreds of hours will cause you to learn a lot of the hidden nuances in the gameplay. Other zeldas just don't have this; they are very rigid in terms of what the player can do. It's about the journey you take in experimenting with your tools and learning about how the world works, and it's one worth taking as every player's story is their own. For that reason I value totk and botw a lot more over past zeldas, at least on a gameplay level. For progress wasn't in the game itself; it was in you all along.

Nah, the modern open world is just mind numbingly boring. Being bigger means there is less substantial things or points of interest. Just seeing gameplay of BoTW or ToTK is enough, look at all that empty, featureless space. Yeah, they fool you into running around, but the "open" in open world is ultimately just filler. You can get the same sense of traveling a vast world without the padding, by making distinct areas and plain old good level design, instead of making me press up for five minutes.

It fits my playstyle really well, i dont have any complaints regarding it but its nice to hear others' opinions

The exploration in the game would've been better if it led to some chicken. This channel promised lots of chicken and now I am hungry (Grumble grumble).

Another fucking idiot who doesn't understand zelda and is blinded by nostalgia. Tears of the kingdom is a masterpiece go cry in a corner, fuckin loser

Very funny to be like “these games are missing something” and then immediately cut to cleavage.

Another nostalgia blind boomer argument, nothing new and nothing of substance. Just abunch complaining about how the old school dungeons are better or too much freedom

I love totk crafting to a certain extent, but the game overall is just too hard when any Bokoblin camp can one shot me, I know it’s a skill issue but dam😊

If botw had real dungeons it would have been perfect.

Overall a good video, but there were a few bothersome unsubstantiated statements, like... "TOTK's temples were an improvement over BOTW's Divine Beasts". In what respect? You immediately went on to say they're still too open, so what did they improve? Aesthetics? I would actually argue that the Divine Beasts (and I'm not defending those either, they're still bad) are actually more spiritually accurate to classic Zelda dungeons than they are, solely because TOTK's temples are just the Divine Beasts without a central control mechanism. Those mechanisms brought a unifying throughline to the beasts, which is something classic dungeons usually had, just in a different way. Without them, dungeons just became 4-5 shrine puzzles on platforms. Literally, in the case of the Water Temple. I wouldn't call TOTK a masterpiece or objectively fantastic, either. Hell, calling even BOTW the former is a tough call now considering how many people think TOTK invalidates its existence, and the fact that BOTW has left an unstable legacy behind with its sequel being such a derivative flop. Although then you have games like Elden Ring that are clearly inspired by it but do its stuff just so much better. So maybe its legacy isn't so unstable? It's certainly been usurped, though. Hell, Elden Ring might be about to win a second GOTY award while TOTK didn't win any.

Nintendo will make a traditional Zelda game it won’t sell as much as botw or totk and nerds like you will be put in their place

11:32 False. Most open ended zelda until open air ones was the original one. So the technical limitation theory doesnt hold.

What fantastic exploration in WW? Its a f*cking literal blue void, nothingness. A developer shortcut for the game to meet a release date. At least TP had landmasses, actual landmarks you can explore. Seing Hyrule Castle in the distance in the middle of a thunderstorm is a moment that WW couldnever replicate. WW its basically holes in a blue plain you enter or at best the immersion braking mini structures or towns we used to see in old school jrpgs.

02:32 That should have ended the video. "Exploration & Discovery" are the corner stones. The new games have those 2 amplified, plus puzzle solving & arguably the best combat in the series. Everything else is either presentation preferences or trivial elements that some fans attached to.

This video was right on

My favourite LoZ game is indeed Majora's Mask! You earned yourself a sub.

As someone who liked the botw shrines but started getting tired of the totk shrines, I still never understood why people complained that they were "short" and "samey," I just figured "Yeah, that's the point. They're little tests by the sheikah/zonai to prepare Link for battle. I never connected to just how much I love the worldbuilding the dungeons in other games do. And I didn't even think about the overworld/underworld flow, because I just already expected the flow to be very different.

Something I can't forgive with BotW and TotK is that there is no musical instrument in either game. There are no songs to learn and play, and I feel like that is such a betrayal of the franchise. Music has always been a core aspect of LoZ because it acts as it's own magic system allowing you to teleport, conjure storms, travel through time, heal those whose souls are lost, etc. Link isn't Link without his ability to play music and change the world around him. Personally, this bothers me even more so than the lack of traditional dungeons/temples.

twilight princess is my fav and not majoras mask, sry.... anyway, i totally agree, i wish they could balance exploration and structure

If you choose not to decide you still have made a choice

Honestly fully agree with this, as much as I enjoyed botw/totk I missed the more structural aspects like with TP - which also tbh with the massive openness of the world and next to know structure also tbh affected the story portion. Leaving so much of the story as like just bits of random open world side quest to seek out instead of letting it unfold during your journey around. I haven't played a lot of them but I think TP is close to being my favourite- the only thing hindering my enjoyment coming from the darn escort mission section of the game I'm so bad at it was doing a replay and really thought I'd be able to get through it this time but I'm once again stuck on it.

0:09 Random, that street is really near where i live in London

this video is mesmerizing I feel like I'm playing where's waldo /pos

BotW was supposed to be a modern interpretation of the very first Zelda game, but I don't think the game succeeded at that goal at all. The magic of Zelda 1 is that on one hand the game is very open and requires exploration, but it also has a lot of structure and a clear difficulty curve. You can't go to any place in the overworld at the beginning, instead it opens up bit by bit when you get new items from the dungeons. You technically can access dungeon 8 within minutes from booting up the game, but you have to know where it's hidden and you're not likely to survive for long unless you know what you're doing. Zelda 1 and 2 are really challenging games compared to pretty much anything that came after. This challenge to exploration, proper dungeons with a clear difficulty curve, and the overworld slowly opening up is completely missing in BotW and TotK. Exploration in these games doesn't feel fun, because the only meaningful things you'll find are uninteresting shrines and lackluster divine beasts/dungeons. There's no natural difficulty curve to the game and no challenge to the exploration. You don't need to plan your expeditions, because you can carry an insane amount of health items, can change your clothing at any time, and the game auto-saves constantly. I really think an actually modern Zelda game that understands the first game on a deep level could be a very exciting and interesting game, but BotW and TotK are definitely not it.

Can't wait for the Zelda cycle to do it's thing when we get a normal-ish Zelda 3 years down the line and people are like "I miss TOTK so much man 😔"

Another day, another millennial video essay bandwagoning on Totk hate. To say that every Zelda game before Botw/Totk had anything in common is hilarious, stopped watching there. It’s just an era of design you don’t like. It’s impossible to make a game that’s both fully focused and fully expansive at the same time. Zelda goes back and forth between both over time, it just depends on the fan complaints from the last game.

Switch Link is an autistic woke cuck, Ocarina of Time Link is a calculating sociopath.

Thank you, Jesus

There is definitely something missing from Tears of the Kingdom, but I'm not sure I would use classic Zelda as a diagnosis for what that is. I think TotK has a lot of classic Zelda design, the Zonai devices work as open world items for unlocking exploration, they are tutorialized one at a time and your ability to accrue them is unlocked at specific points in the sky. So I wouldn't agree that, that element of items unlocking exploration is lacking from TotK. I would argue that there's too much of it, too much overlap, too many items to unlock, and their overlapping, non-essential roles mean you can more or less ignore them. The problem is this decision fatigue, as you rightly point out, is costly. The game is a lot more tedious to explore if you don't engage with them, especially if you already played BotW. Old Zelda games you would not be able to progress at all if you didn't understand something, but TotK lets you proceed anyway if you don't understand even its most fundamental systems. In BotW, you would have to figure out some way to mitigate weather or climb over stuff, but TotK has much lower barriers to any of its challenges. As you said, you can settle into a tried-and-true, but possibly far from optimal set of tools over the course of the whole game. While I agree classic Zelda prevented this, it does so by grinding the game to a complete halt. I'm not sure what the solution is here, but I don't think it will be found in classic Zelda, I think the team needs to look ahead. IMO, TotK would have benefitted from not reusing so much of BotW's world progression, like blood moons, towers, shrines, Korok seeds, etc... Its gameplay needed wholly new contextualization that would minimize its decision fatigue. I'd go so far to argue, as much as I enjoyed revisiting this world, BotW's Hyrule is not the best map for TotK's gameplay. The whole map should have been designed to better teach players how to engage with its mechanics, instead of throwing a ton of tutorial shrines all over the place in highly missable locations.

I love your videos! Keep up the great work ❤

I think improving on The WW and TP formulas would make a better open-world LoZ. They had the open exploration to varying degrees with the direction of a more linear experience and some challenge in terms of puzzle and enemy design. Having open overworld movement with larger, semi-linear dungeons with fun dungeon items that actually get used, and better rewards is my ideal LoZ game.

Finally someone sees

I love the last line about leaving behind the artistic refinement. Personally, Aonuma and Fujibiyashi will never deliver that as they are both clearly mechanically minded individuals. Unless another artistic minded person like Koizumi leads Zelda, we’re stuck with this I fear. Did you play Pikmin 4? That game felt like a classic Nintendo game.

Instead of having just one place where you get, for example, the Hookshot, why not having 5 spots where you can find it? And after getting that Hookshot, the remaining 4 spots will change and give you instead something that upgrades the Hookshot.

I appreciate your insights, but I find your editing distracting, and I don’t need to see your crotch.

wait I'm sorry but you like the exploration in windwaker? I found it to be so incredibly boring. I would literally set my ship towards the island I was heading to and leave the game running while I did chores. There nothing to do while traveling to an island. the island themselves were very good but the travel between them? no.

Breath of the Wild was fantastic. All the conventions it broke were completely necessary. Totk, on the other hand, was just unnecessary, bloated, repetitive and unfulfilling.

Sorry, I do hate this revisionism . Yes totk is being heavily panned now but there seems to be an uptick in people saying all the rest were great releases at the time . Only oot had a massive fanfare through its release . Mm was disliked due to its mechanics. Ww was given flack from fans as the last third of the game clunky and the boat mechanic were tedious . Twilight princess received the worst of it in the few years of its release. Stretched out over world , cluttering of items , weak cop out with ganondorf being the actual baddy. Wasn’t until skyward was released it got a better reevaluation . Ss criticism came more so from a generation that had just been spoiled by the likes of dark souls 1-3 and Skyrim of that same year. Truth is , this franchise needed botw and this franchise equally was not going go drop those elements of the game to appease fans for a more linear progression . If anything 20 million copies sold is a enough for Nintendo to continue the formula of open air

I enjoyed every second of this. FINALLY! Someone who understands my angle. Also Editing was incredibly engaging . :V 10/10