So, I'm in the procrastination phase of the game. Much as I've been meaning to buy a replacement for my 21-year-old car but cannot seem to get around to it, I've hit a point in Tears of the Kingdom in which I can probably go ahead and finish the game, but I'm... you know, not doing that.
It's interesting comparing this with Elden Ring. Elden Ring is also an open-world game, but the actual structure of it is really no different than FromSoft's other Souls-like games. Zelda games have always had lots of optional content - you could always collect more heart pieces, for instance. But these games have been built with more of an open-world RPG system, including such things as a quest log.
On one hand, there's something impressive about the huge number of hidden collectables. While Ocarina of Time had a fair number, there's a far greater variety of, for example, armor sets. In OoT, you basically just had three Tunics to collect, that really played specific functions - you'd wear the red one if you wanted to go into the fiery areas of the game like the Fire Temple, or the blue one if you needed to go underwater, but that was it. In this game, you have tons of different suits with different effects, like one that is better for skydiving, one that will protect you from gloom locking out some of your hearts - and they all come in three pieces which need to be collected separately.
Another aspect of how this is more similar to open-world RPGs is the way that health is recovered.
I realize that there is a generation of Zelda players who have only ever known the Breath of the Wild-style Zelda game. Skyward Sword came out in 2011, now 13 years ago. I was 12 when I first played Ocarina of Time (basically a month after it came out - I got it for Christmas, if memory serves). And the Zelda series and I are the same age - it first came out in 1986 (it beats me by 4 months, actually). Breath of the Wild came out in 2017, so for the past seven years, this has been what a modern Zelda game looks like. So, if you were 12 when BotW came out, you'd have been born in 2005, a year before Twilight Princess came out, but after Wind Waker.
Sorry, just had to figure out all that math.
Anyway, in the games prior to Breath of the Wild, food wasn't really a thing in the game - you could sometimes get something like LonLon Milk, which was essentially a potion (collecting bottles to store various things used to be a whole thing). To recover hearts, you needed to generally smash pots or cut tall grass, or sometimes monsters would drop one when you killed them (and that was generally the only thing they'd drop other than rupees.)
Unless you had a bottle with a health potion inside, there was no item that you'd use to heal up.
And that creates an interesting gameplay distinction:
See, one of the things I don't really like about the last two Zelda games is that enemies hit like trucks. In Tears of the Kingdom, I typically go around in the the full set of Phantom Armor, which theoretically has a much higher defensive rating than most of the other armor sets. And yet, still, a simple Bokoblin will hit me for like 8 hearts worth of damage. Even with a reasonably extensive number of hearts (I think I have like 15 or so) that means that any hit I take is going to put me at like half health. It's a big chunk.
When my health goes low, then, the right call is to go into the pause menu and eat up some of the food I've cooked. This has actually led me to realize that it's best to have most of my food give me no particular status buff, because if I eat a relevant food like "cold weather attack up" when I'm in a snowy region, I don't want to overwrite it with something like "glow for two minutes."
From a design perspective, then, I think the game needs to have things hit super hard. Otherwise, you don't need to use up the food stockpile you've got. Essentially, if you aren't at risk of suddenly dying to a massive amount of damage, the challenge of the combat goes away. But the result is that you need to have that massive stockpile of food in your inventory at any given time, and you need to replenish it after you've been in a tough fight. This, then, creates two incentives for the player - to either become a master of dodging like you're playing Dark Souls, or to spend a significant portion of your time in-game finding food materials to cook, and then a lot of time cooking tons of meals (and dear lord do I wish there was a "cook X number of this particular combination of ingredients" button).
The older Zelda games had monsters that hit at varying levels of power, but generally less than in these games, but because healing was harder to come by, the difficulty was still there.
Essentially, this has the Skyrim problem - healing as a system is more about interrupting the action of the combat, going into a pause menu and scarfing down an absurd amount of food. I think it places greater emphasis on preparation than the moment-to-moment thrill of combat.
Anyway, bah humbug. Still enjoying the game.
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