Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom

No Spoliers please!

A little surprised this hasn't come up here yet, so I'll start it.

Couldn't get the hang of the crafting to solve Shrines at first and almost quit( was SO frustrated) until I realised I was using the wrong 4-some of buttons for the on screen instructions.....!

Now finding it very smooth and intuitive and fun.

Weapon crafting is fun and a neat mini explore. It's like BotW in one way, don't get attatched to any single weapon, but weapons in general feel like they do more after you combine them. Sticking stuff on arrows is a neat new feature too.

they found some novel ways to recycle the towers but with new interesting ways to earn them besides just climbing.

I am about 15 shrines in, and now moving freely between the ground and sky islands. I think I've solved most of the shrines I've tackled the intended way and only brute force constructed through 1.

Still mostly just enjoying exploring, it does feel like Shrines are much easier to locate this time , but each one is a bit more involved.

Mine arrives today.

Torn between keeping it a secret so I can play through on my own at work versus letting the kids see it and then having to share with them which will just lead to slow progress and disruption of the zen-like flow the first game instilled in me.

Damn kids, always ruining my video game experiences

Are there multiple saves in the first one? I don't remember.

Gary Sax wrote: Are there multiple saves in the first one? I don't remember.

I dunno, it seems like the seamless autosave typical of modern games. As predicted, the kids went nuts about it till we had to go into the cold and then they threw the controller at me and I had to figure out the damned "we are nintendo and won't follow everyone else" control scheme. I can already see that having to bind stuff together and rotate them is gonna be a PITA for puzzles.

Still, it feels sooooooo good to be back in this world.

When I first played Breath of the Wild I was with the herd. I thought it was the best game ever and couldn't get enough of it. I then replayed it and started to see the flaws in it and it bumped down from an 10/10 experience to more like a 7/10.

Tears of the Kingdom lands closer to that second experience than the first for me. To be clear, it is not glorified DLC and they've done a lot of good work to balance exploring a familiar map with making it feel entirely new. My biggest gripes are:
1) the combat system is quite difficult without any of the satisfaction of a deeper system like the souls series
2) I despise crafting things. It's funny to watch 30s clips of crimes against Koroks but knowing that building those things involves gluing shit together using terrible 3D rotation controls takes some of the shine off of the game. I often can recognise the solution to a shrine pretty early but then have to spend 5-10 minutes aligning and gluing to get the balance right in order to pull off the intended solution. It's just tedious and not fun.

The game is good, I find it compelling and want to keep playing but the central hook of crafting doesn't grab me leaving it a somewhat hollow experience.

Yeah, played it most of yesterday and the crafting is 80% frustration and 20% fun. And I absolutely can see some of the more advanced puzzles being hellscape nightmares of trying to fabricate some long rube goldberg contraption versus the mostly timing based system of BotW.

Still, it is damned fun. The graphics seem overly bright, may be some sort of HDR setting on my TV though. Hard to believe I'm playing this on a 6(?) year old console, has there even been a higher horsepower switch yet?

How they never spun the cooking off into it's own game boogles the mind. My son just wants to cook up stuff. Its nice because they have't streamlined it AT ALL, so its a good time to go get a beer while he whips up 10 dishes for me.

My daughter already wants to tame every horse. I mentioned the stal-horse from the first game so I'm sure she will want one of those as well. I see they added the ability to tow stuff, we'll see where that goes. Be nice if they put in the ability to crouch a lance for a proper charge.

jason10mm wrote: Still, it is damned fun. The graphics seem overly bright, may be some sort of HDR setting on my TV though. Hard to believe I'm playing this on a 6(?) year old console, has there even been a higher horsepower switch yet?

I cannot fathom why they chose to set the introduction against brightly lit fields of gold when the console cannot handle it well. I booted it up and thought the game looked like shit and remembered BOTW looking so much better. After the tutorial area the visuals do get back to where you expect but it was a jarring first few hours.