The Epic Finale of Tears of the Kingdom

 I realized just now that this is the first new Zelda game I've beaten since the release of Twilight Princess, the first game I got for the Wii back in 2006. To go eighteen years without doing so is kind of nuts, but in my defense, there are only two games between then and now to have come out - Skyward Sword and Breath of the Wild. (I did play and beat the Switch remake of Link's Awakening, but given that that is, as I understand it, a pretty faithful recreation of the 1993 Gameboy title, I'm not counting it as a "new" Zelda game.)

Tears of the Kingdom is, like Breath of the Wild, a big open world game, which means that the "main quest" of the game is a relatively small fraction of what exists there. I could, of course, spend many more hours hunting down every shrine, doing every side quest, but I suspect that the assumption Nintendo has is that you'll only do part of it. (Unlike my obsessive Elden Ring playthroughs in which I've done nearly everything on like seven different characters).

I don't know if there's some secret scaling, but while I did complete all the Divine Beasts in Breath of the Wild, I never felt quite ready to go face off against Calamity Ganon, and kind of ran out of enthusiasm as every cool weapon I had lasted about long enough to kill a single monster. I wonder if I were to go back and play it again (and maybe do so on the Switch rather than the Wii U) I might enjoy it more. But then again, the games are so similar in presentation, gameplay, and the world itself that I suspect I'd only miss the innovations from Tears of the Kingdom.

Still, let's talk about the finale.

What Exactly Are the Depths in Tears of the Kingdom?

 It's kind of embarrassing. After playing tons of Tears of the Kingdom, I've only now just noticed something that was kind of staring me in the face:

The Depths are the inverse of Hyrule.

Let's back up.

The first Zelda game I was ever really aware of was Link to the Past, though the first I played was Ocarina of Time. I got my N64 in 1997, only a year after I had gotten my SNES, so the two systems for me more or less overlapped - I'd buy used games from Funcoland (by the way, if you're young and don't remember Funcoland, imagine a cool little indie game store where they have a ton of consoles with the latest games running in banks along the walls so you can try them out, only as a national chain. Sadly, they got eaten up by Gamestop) and so, for example, after finding Samus to be my favorite Super Smash Bros. character, going back and picking up Super Metroid.

In A Link to the Past, the concept of it is that you have both the Light World and the Dark World. The Light World is your classic Hyrule, with Hyrule Castle at it center, while the Dark World is a once-beautiful Golden Land that was corrupted when Ganon seized the Triforce of Power. The Light World has plenty of enemies, but the Dark World is everything turned up to greater levels of spookiness, and has Ganon's Pyramid of Power in its center. The game uses these two worlds cleverly for some puzzles, where you might need to swap between them to get past barriers. It also divides the game into two distinct segments - the first part in which you have three dungeons to complete in the Light World, and the second part, in which there are I think eight dungeons in the Dark World (three of which occupy the same spots as the Light World ones).

Ocarina of Time would repeat this idea in a different way. The two versions of the world are separated instead by time, with Child Link going through an era in which there are problems, but overall Hyrule is at peace, and Adult Link in a world in which Castle Town has been utterly devastated and Ganondorf has destroyed Hyrule Castle and replaced it with his ominous floating fortress. Various parts of the world are different, like Zora's Domain flooding over or Lake Hylia draining.

Subsequent games didn't so much do this "two versions of the world" thing, though they did typically divide the main quest into two main phases, usually collecting some group of items from the first few dungeons and then a separate set of items from later ones. One could argue Skyward Sword had two versions of the world in the Sky and the ground level, but in practice this mainly allowed them to turn the ramp-up to the dungeons on the surface something of dungeons themselves (ironically the last game before Breath of the Wild was maybe their most restrictive, least open-world entry).

Anyway, given that Tears of the Kingdom largely reuses the same map from Breath of the Wild, I guess I wasn't thinking too much about this idea of a parallel world.

In fact, Tears of the Kingdom has three layers to its world - the surface, which is, again, mostly the same as it Breath of the Wild, and then the Sky, which is a bit more like Skyward Sword's sky area, having only a relatively small surface area of isolated sky islands that are tricky to get to, and then the Depths.

The closest equivalent to the Depths I can think of in other games I've played is The Maw from World of Warcraft's Shadowlands expansion - specifically in its first patch, before the Maw was made a little less hostile.

The Depths are taxing - there's no civilization to be found here, and it's hard to see. One of the biggest goals in exploring the Depths are to find the various Lightroots. Not only do these act as fast-travel locations, but their light both allows you to see farther (Brightbloom Seeds are a consumable and collectable resource that you can toss around the place to get reasonable lighting in a small area, but hte Lightroots are both permanent and have a far larger radius) and their light will cure Gloom, which prevents you from healing hearts that are affected. The Lightroots are also the only way to fill out your map - until you can get those giant beacons of light, you can't really see the overall layout of the surrounding area.

While perhaps not as hard-limited as the Maw was in WoW's 9.0 period, it'll take a while in Tears of the Kingdom before you can really afford to take extended trips to the Depths.

The Lightroots have odd names, but I realized only recently that the names are familiar if you spell them backwards. In fact, they are all the names of Shrines on the surface of Hyrule.

This has actually come out as a huge strategic hint for me in figuring out where Lightroots might be - if I look at my surface map and find a shrine I've discovered, I can just look directly below it and place a beacon and I'll find a Lightroot. I don't believe there's a similar connection to the ones on the Sky Islands, but this is still pretty helpful. Likewise, if a Lightroot is found in the depths, you can infer that there's a shrine above it on the surface.

Naturally, my interpretation here is that the Shrines and Lightroots are likely connected. The shrines seem to be a kind of purification and recycling system for magical power - taking evil magic and transforming it into healing light magic. And I think that the output, essentially, is in the Depths, pumping light into this place of darkness.

This realization about the connection between the Shrines and the Lightroots, though, led me to realize something else that had been staring me in the face:

The Depths are an exact inverse of the Surface.

I think the first thing that I realized was that you could find Bargainer Statues beneath all great goddess statues - the ones in the wellsprings of Wisdom, Courage, and Power, as well as the one in Hebra Canyon. But then you look at the Shrine/Lightroot connection, and then you look at the topography of the Depths.

The thing is, while the Skyview Towers give you a pretty enormous swath of the surface map - there are only like twelve of them - your map of the Depths requires pretty diligent Lightroot-hunting to get a big view of it.

But now that I've done a fair amount of that, the truth is revealed: the Depths' topography is the exact inverse of the Surface. Wherever there is a tall mountain in Hyrule, there's a deep pit. Where there's a canyon above, there's a giant ridge below.

This has led me to wonder something:

The Depths can be reached simply by diving into big holes in the ground - the "chasms," as the game refers to them. These take you through a pretty solid chunk of earth surrounded by gloom before you fall down into the Depths.

But what if that seemingly physical relationship is masking something bigger? What if we're actually traveling across dimensions?

What if the Depths is The Dark World?

Naturally, there are big differences here. The Dark World, for example, is a shadowy reflection of the Light World, but is physically similar. Death Mountain, for example, is a mountain in both versions (I also think it's uniquely called the same thing in both worlds. Both have a spooky woods, but the Lost Woods in the Light World is the Skeleton Woods in the Dark World.)

Still, it's not like Hyrule looks the same in Tears of the Kingdom as it did in A Link to the Past (while Death Mountain is still roughly in the northeast, Kakariko Village is almost exactly on the opposite side of the map). Zelda games tend to reimagine the world significantly between entries (with the Tears of the Kingdom probably the biggest exception when compared to Breath of the Wild).

The Depths even has its own weird skybox - a kind of brown-gold haze.

What is interesting, though, is that unlike the Dark World, which seems to, at the point we get to it in Link to the Past, be fully saturated in the dark sensibilities of Ganon, the Depths has evidence of less evil elements, like the various Zonai mines and processing centers, and the decidedly true neutral Bargainer statues (which, again, are placed in a position equivalent to the goddess Hylia on the Surface, suggesting that the Bargainer might be essentially the primary god of that realm. (The fact that a Bargainer statue speaks to us through a Hylia statue on that plateau where we wake up in Breath of the Wild raises all manner of disturbing questions.)

Unfortunately, the Depths is a little thin on detail. Compared with the surface world, it's pretty homogeneous in terms of aesthetic. Other than Zonai constructs and Yiga clan bases (appropriate to see them there given that the Yiga sigil is an upside down version of the Shiekah one) it's kind of all just gloom, desiccated/petrified trees, and gloom-empowered monsters. I could have imagined a version of the game in which the Depths were more fleshed out as a kind of mirror world to the Surface, but I think that they might not have been able to do as much with the sky islands.

Still, conceptually I find the Depths to be kind of fascinating.

Lynel-Hunting and Feeling Powerful in Tears of the Kingdom

 Well, I have now gotten the Fierce Deity set fully upgraded. The combined defense value when this is completed is 60 - 20 per piece of armor, which seems likely to be better than just about any other. Doing so took a lot of effort - you need one of each of the four pieces off the three dragons that fly above Hyrule - first a scale, then a claw, then a fang fragment, then a horn - along with various powerful monster pieces - first Hinox toenails, then I believe teeth, then guts, and then, the last and hardest part: Lynel guts.

Guts, it has become apparent, are only guaranteed drops off of the most powerful version of a monster, and when it comes to Lynels, the Silver ones (which are the most powerful) only show up after you've killed a lot of their fellows.

Lynels, incidentally, are the giant lion-centaurs that will kill the absolute crap out of you until you get really good at dodging their attacks - and the silver ones will break a pretty serious shield in only one or two hits.

Upgrading armor to +4, as well, requires a number of side quests to reunite a band of musicians and then put together a mechanism to get their wagon to the Great Fairy Fountains - some of these are pretty trivial, just as easy has taking a board, popping a couple of wheels on it and a steering stick, and going for it. But the second one I wound up doing required crossing a pretty broad snow field, including a fairly steep climb (oh, and I was out of Big Wheel capsules).

So it takes some serious effort to do this.

But, having a full set of fully-upgraded Fierce Deity armor, I feel pretty darn powerful. And, in fact, because I've been killing tons of Lynels (having had to kill a number of them just to get the Silver-Maned ones to show up) I'm now kitted out with a ton of Lynel bows, which each shoot multiple arrows at a time and thus triple or, at higher levels, quintuple the damage you deal with them (luckily the Lynels also drop a lot of arrows). I think I've gotten better at doing precision dodges as well, which has helped make taking down Lynels a lot easier (the last one I downed to get by sixth Lynel Gut to finish the set, I paraglided in and unleashed with a 5-arrow Lynel Bow churning through Black Bokoblin Horns and got him down to about 5% health before finishing him off with a melee strike).

I think this is one of the things that makes me like Tears of the Kingdom better than Breath of the Wild - because you can stockpile monster parts like all the Lynel horns and hooves that I've been collecting, even when your weapons break as long as you can find a sword or spear somewhere, you can fuse in one of those items and have a perfectly decent weapon to fight with. Because Breath of the Wild had no such system, there was no real ability to stockpile weapon supplies other than simply carrying a bunch of powerful weapons and swapping them out as they broke. Now, even if every one of my weapons get destroyed, as long as I can pick up any weapon (and it's not hard to find some decent ones on those rock piles in the Depths) I know that I'll have something decent to fight with.

I still think we run into the problem that the Master Sword feels too precious to use - even after it's recharged and repaired.

I honestly think that if they wanted to keep the Fuse system in a future game, I could imagine doing something where we have a base weapon that we fight with in all cases similar to other games but making these fusions the temporary thing.

Still, I've got to say that the power fantasy of being able to absolutely clobber things like Hinoxes and Taluses that were once a real challenge to me when I started the game feels pretty good. And having now taken down like a dozen Lynels after the first one unceremoniously one-shot me feels pretty good as well.

(I still don't love having to farm food materials, though.)

Cranky Old Man Plays Tears of the Kingdom - Healing and Food

 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.

An Accidental Sequence Break in Tears of the Kingdom

 There are different approaches one can take to an open world game.

In a game like Skyrim, the "main quest" is one that can sort of be lost in the shuffle of all the other various stories you can play through. And when you defeat Alduin, there's still the whole world sitting around, waiting for you to complete other quests and stories.

Elden Ring was kind of fascinating, in that the actual nature of the game didn't change that much from the Dark Souls and similar releases FromSoft had made - the only real distinction was that the world was far larger and not as bottlenecked.

The notion of an open world game could, arguably, be traced back to the Zelda series, and the first game that introduced this idea of a big world to explore with all of its deadly dungeons.

The point is: Tears of the Kingdom has quests in a way that is more familiar to the Elder Scrolls or even World of Warcraft model than the Zelda games I grew up on. Yeah, we had Navi yelling in our ear every five minutes to go do the Water Temple already, but in a certain sense, the experience of the game was linear, so there was almost a distinction between "doing the story" and "doing quests" that were more like found objectives out in the world (the most epic in Ocarina of Time being the timed merchant-trading series that ultimately got you the Biggoron Sword, which took both hands but actually did more damage than the Master Sword).

So, here's what happened to me:

In terms of "main quest" progress, I'm pretty far. I've finished the "Regional Phenomena" quest that takes you to the four major dungeons at each corner of the world (that basically correspond with the four non-Hylian races and their settlements, each of which had its own Divine Beast in Breath of the Wild). I've also found all the petroglyphs and the memories contained in them, and I've gotten the Master Sword.

So, the endgame is coming close.

But it might take me less time, because I went exploring.

There's a lightning storm in the south central part of Hyrule (I believe it's above an area called Faron) that looked similar to the blizzard over the Rito village before you complete the Wind Temple. I built a Zonai airplane and flew over there, carefully stowing any metallic weapons or shields (though I've found if I want to make some lightning-charged chu-chu jelly tossing a metal shield into a pile of raw jelly in the middle of a storm is a great way to do it).

There, I found a shrine as well as a pair of doors that, like the Temple of Time, required a certain number of hearts to open. I'm at something like 13 or 14 at this point, so I had more than enough, and what I got was a weird little Zonai device that shot a laser into a particular statue down on the ground level. Building another glider-airplane thingie (and overshooting it, which was pain,) I brought this device to the statue, which unlocked a deeper structure that led to a platform that took me down into the Depths.

This... this felt pretty huge for something I had just stumbled upon.

And it turned out that it was huge. The head was for a construct that would be designed to allow the spirit of Rauru's older sister, Mineru, the Sage of Spirit, to inhabit. Like the other dungeons, I had to do a number of related tasks - in this case, retrieving the parts for Mineru's construct, which each involved some Zonai engineering puzzles - and then transport the pieces to the frame for the construct (I had actually done something similar with a giant Bargainer statue and a set of eyes earlier).

Then, I got to ride the construct - which is not the most convenient as simply walking drains your battery charges - on a journey to the Spirit Temple (I fought a Hynox on the construct along the way). And then, the Temple itself jumped immediately to a boss fight - one that was less about dealing damage and more about knocking a corrupted construct into an electrified wall.

And Lo and Behold, I got my fifth Sage ring activated and another ally for my honestly unwieldy, giant adventuring party.

I'm sure that there were quests that were going to lead to this experience, which I have yet to come across. But, credit to Nintendo, they allowed exploration to lead to this discovery, and I suspect they'll have alternate quest text to acknowledge that I did this before I was officially supposed to.

This Is What It Sounds Like When Dragons Cry - Tears of the Kingdom

 So, a couple things have changed since I played Breath of the Wild.

One that we shouldn't ignore is that I'm not playing the game on a super heavy Wii U tablet controller. The Wii U was a remarkable feat of ingenuity, but one that really didn't have the technology to execute its vision in a painless way. The Switch basically solved all of the Wii U's issues, and I imagine that most BotW fans played it on a Switch instead.

But also, I think that ToTK has rebalanced things in a way that make it less of a pain - weapons still break, but you get a pretty decent amount of use out of them before they do - I've cleared dungeons in this game only breaking a single weapon. While there's an impermanence to any cool weapon you come across, it's not nearly as much of a pain.

Indeed, the fact that your best weapons are created by fusing things to existing weapons was a huge revelation to me, and further makes it less painful - early on I was fusing whole weapons to one another, which turned out to be a bad strategy. Instead, simply by fusing Zoanite robot bits and horns or claws form various monsters to weapons that kind of fit with them (for example, Bokoblin Horns seem to go great on spears) will get you decently powerful weapons that also last a pretty decent amount of time.

Another difference is that I invested more in Stamina - I think in BotW I was getting killed so quickly that I didn't feel I could afford to ever get anything other than heart containers. There are for sure still situations in which I'll die from a single hit when I still have like 9 hearts (even with my high-defense Phantom Armor) but it's rarer.

Anyway, the point is that I can see myself really getting through this game - there's countless side quests to track down, of course, but with three of the four major dungeons down, and now with the Master Sword in hand, I feel like I can actually get to the end of the game and at least call it a success - hopefully before Final Fantasy VII Rebirth comes out in twenty days.

I haven't done a lot of monster-massacre construction like the things you've seen on YouTube - though I did put together that little Hover Bike thing, which is somewhat useful but I think I need to farm a lot more battery charges (I'm up to seven total - two full batteries and one third of another.)

The dungeons in this game are certainly, to my mind, better than the ones in Breath of the Wild, though there's definitely a samey-ness to the design of them (each has you activating like four or five things that you need your local companion to hit with their special ability). There aren't memorable mini-bosses, and even the bosses go down pretty easily (I did the Water Temple today, and the boss there seemed particularly easy - I might regret going to the Air Temple first, which had what definitely feels like the most epic boss so far).

Still, in contrast with the Ancient Beasts, the dungeons here feel very much like their own distinct places, with thematically appropriate puzzles.

Anyway, I'm going to try to stop and smell the roses as best as I can, but I do want to try to beat the game before the 29th so I can pick up with Cloud and the gang.

The Wind Temple

 Well, I did the first real "dungeon" of Tears of the Kingdom. And I have to say that this was a big improvement over my biggest complaint about Breath of the Wild - the dungeon had its own personality and vibe.

Now, just to be nitpicky, the design of the Wind Temple, which is essentially a giant flying airship, was fairly simple compared with previous Zelda dungeons. You hold this up to the Yeti's House or the Forest Temple and it's not quite the same.

But, unlike the Divine Beasts in Breath of the Wild, this felt like the mechanics and look of the temple were really tailored to the specifics of the story the dungeon was telling. This might be a premature assessment - after all, I haven't seen the other ones. But I'm just going to say that this one felt like fun, and I felt clever for figuring out how to take down the boss.

The Wind Temple is the dungeon associated with the Rito in the northwest of the map (it's been long enough since I played BotW that I don't know if the map is exactly the same, but the overall layout is still clearly meant to be. This is one of those unusual Zelda games that is a direct sequel to the previous one, similar to how Majora's Mask has the same Link as Ocarina of Time, but unlike that one, this is set in Hyrule once again).

There's an endless blizzard freezing the area, and so you go with a young Rito named Tulin up a massive complex of sky-islands until you finally get high enough to dive down into the heart of the storm, where you find a legendary sky-ship that was a big part of Rito culture but thought to be a myth.

The dungeon itself is basically one big multi-part puzzle, where you need to activate a number of wind turbines that Tulin's special ability lets you do. Thus, the dungeon can be completed in any order. The place has berserk Zoltai constructs and some Keeses and a few automated turrets that can ruin your day (thankfully if you're knocked off, you can teleport mid-air to the main deck.

One of the minor challenges here is that it's cold enough that you'll likely need some consumable cold resistance gear - I only ever got a set of warm leggings and boots, which was fine for most snowy areas but not here, so I had to eat up a bunch of consumables I'd made to avoid taking damage from the cold. Luckily, the interior spaces of the ship are warm enough that you can get by (at least with those leggings) so it's only a concern when you're in the outside areas.

So, once you activate all the turbines, you can open up a big gate in the main deck, and this releases a boss. The boss is a giant sky-serpent with three circular segments. The tops of these are all covered in scales, but when you fight it, the updraft lets you float up or descend, and you can shoot the icy undersides of these segments with your bow (the dungeon is very generous with arrows and doesn't seem to require using them a lot, but Din, Farore, and Nayru help you if run out.) I found myself using up a lot of Keese wings on the arrows to give myself the range to hit the icy segments - with a powerful bow I was able to crack the ice in one or two shots and then hit the tender underside.

The boss then summons whirlwinds that can knock you out and damage you, but I didn't find them too hard to avoid. And bing bang, with enough arrows the fight was over, and Tulin gained a sacred tear that allowed him to become the Sage of Wind, which included letting him create an avatar that now follows me around in the world and lets me use his special ability. I suspect that, similar to the Divine Beast-derived abilities in the previous game, you'll collect one of these from each of the dungeons.

Much as I look back with frustration at Breath of the Wild, I do remember actually enjoying it to a certain degree. And I'm having fun in Tears of the Kingdom. I'm a little worried, though, that Nintendo has effectively said that earlier styles of Zelda games are now extinct, and that this very narrowly specific Breath of the Wild-derived version is the only thing to stay. This game, from the sound effects to the cooking mechanics to the combat mechanics to the look and aesthetic of it, are all basically unchanged from BotW.

See, when they did this with Majora's Mask, I didn't have an issue with it because that game came out like a year and a half after Ocarina of Time - a, frankly, absurdly quick turnaround.

Again, I think there's a good chance that the thing hardcore fans of this style of Zelda game will always love is the ability to screw around in the game world. I suppose it might be my age, but while I definitely remember causing mayhem in various Grand Theft Auto games for hours on end, these days I want to feel like I'm getting a complete experience in a game simply by playing through the main story.

Anyway, I'm old. Grumble grumble, newfangled kids these days with their Minecrafts and their Fortnites.

A Little Farther in Tears of the Kingdom

 So, I'm concerned.

There are definitely new elements in this game, and there does seem to be a greater variety of monsters to fight, but I've got to say: Tears of the Kingdom was clearly built for people who already loved Breath of the Wild, and feels as if it's changing as little of that basic style of gameplay as possible.

Which puts me, as someone who doesn't love that game, in a sort of underwhelmed position.

I'm still very early, but that also tells you something: progression through the game is a slow task. Traversal of the environment is a lengthy thing, and there are difficult encounters (I died like a dozen or more times to a Battle Talus with three Bokoblins riding it) that sort of pop out of nowhere.

I'm pushing forward in the main story in the hopes of finding a cool dungeon, but... well, again, I fear this game just might not be for me.

Which is a shame, because it means it's been nearly twenty years since I've loved a new Zelda game (Twilight Princess, to be precise).

I expect I'll stick with it for a bit, let the game reveal its charms and secrets. Indeed, in Breath of the Wild I actually did all four of the divine beast "dungeons."

See, I don't think I even dislike the grand open world. I think it's just that this is such a survival simulator rather than an adventure game. Maybe I should try to build more strange Zonai devices like I've seen on YouTube (which genuinely seems like the coolest new part of the game, but I wonder if I just need to find places with the right materials or if I haven't unlocked all the potential capsules yet.)

I think there's this really delicate balance that open world games in particular need to strike - between freedom and tedium. For example, Elden Ring has a big crafting system, and you can definitely get lots of useful things through it, but it's also something that you can kind of live without - if you treat the game as just a Dark Souls sequel with an utterly massive and less bleakly monochromatic world (and, if I may be so bold, a more interesting set of background lore) you'll be fine.

But I'm still sitting here missing the more "curated" experience of the Zelda games I grew up on, like Ocarina of Time.

Oh well, I guess this is what it feels like to grow old.

Getting Vertical in Tears of the Kingdom

 I was hesitant to get Tears of the Kingdom. Breath of the Wild was, for many, the ultimate expression of what a Zelda game could be, but this massive acclaim left me, and others who liked the more structured format of previous Zelda games, feeling lonely and left behind. When it was announced that the next Zelda game would look similar to Breath of the Wild, and even furthermore that Zelda games moving forward would, I was disheartened.

I haven't made my mind up about this one.

But that's due in part to the fact that the tutorial is freaking long. I think I played for three or four hours, and only now have I finally reached the ground level of Hyrule Kingdom.

Like Breath of the Wild, you're given a ton of abilities right at the start, earned by completing a number of Shrines. The abilities from Breath of the Wild are gone (largely) and so here we learn the Ultrahand, which lets us pick up big objects and stick them together with magical glue, the Fuse ability, which lets us combine weapons and shields with various objects in the world (including other weapons). We get Ascend, which lets us leap up into any flat surface above us to come out on top of whatever is up there. And we get Rewind, which lets us cause an object to start moving in reverse for a limited time.

Once again, it becomes a lot to learn all at once. But I do think that in this case, the features are somewhat easier to grasp (except maybe Fuse). We also get an energy capacitor that powers various Zonai (the new ancient civilization) devices, including fans that we can stick onto constructed vehicles to travel around.

This game seems to be a direct sequel to Breath of the Wild, but there's a justification for Link losing all but three heart containers and the de-powering of the Master Sword.

Weapons will still break after a small number of uses, but the good news is that if you use the Fuse ability to construct your own weapons, these seem to last significantly longer.

Still, despite coming out several years after Breath of the Wild, this feels very much like how they did Majora's Mask - many of the assets and gameplay systems are the same, like Korok's giving you little "seeds," the same kind of sound effects, the same volume and temperature gauges, the same stamina meter, and the same use of shrines to get the equivalent of heart pieces (that I assume can also be used eventually to increase Stamina).

So, to me the proof in the pudding will be whether we have more distinctive monsters in different regions and particularly if we have unique-feeling dungeons.

Still, if this is how long it takes to get through the tutorial section, I feel like this is a game that is going to expect me to pour a ton of hours into it. I'm no stranger to playing games that require a big time investment (see World of Warcraft, Elden Ring) but I wonder if this game is geared more toward people who enjoy things like Minecraft - where the game's stated objectives aren't really as important as building the cool thing you want to make, which is a format I'm less inclined toward.

Fears of the Kingdom

 Getting old is a very strange experience.

The Zelda series is as old as I am. The original Legend of Zelda came out in 1986, a few months before I was born. Of Nintendo's franchises, Zelda has generally been reserved as a kind of "event." While the company liberally throws Mario into all manner of genre-bending or simply other-genre games (spawning, for instance, perhaps the most beloved video game racing series in Mario Kart) Zelda has often come around only once or, occasionally, twice in a console generation.

While there were a few Zelda games around when I was a young kid, I actually didn't get into the series until 1998's Ocarina of Time. Later, I would go back and play A Link to the Past.

Breath of the Wild, the most recent entry in the main Zelda series, is a game that is beloved by countless players. The adoration and affection people feel for this game cannot be denied. But I've been on record here on this blog that I found the game thin and empty. Or, rather, I found that it didn't seem to belong to the Zelda series that I loved.

Now, opinions vary from person to person about all things, especially in matters of taste. My own opinions are just that - my own. BotW's popularity means that it clearly struck some chord with a massive number of people, but it's a chord that I have struggled to identify.

My best guess is that the reason people love this game is the experimentation it allows with the tools and environments. The game is a sandbox game, which until recently I simply thought of as an older term for what we now refer to as an open-world game. But the sandbox here is not about the world being open and free (the classic "see that mountain in the distance? You can climb it" which Breath of the Wild does, admirably, allow better than most games that make such promises) and is instead more about giving the players tools to make their own games and toys.

The formula of Zelda games that I grew up on was to have a narrative that led you through environmental traversal and quest-like objectives interacting with NPCs and into unique, aesthetically diverse dungeons that mixed puzzles with lightly challenging foes to fight, culminating in a challenging set-piece against a final boss. And, crucially, each dungeon gave you a new tool to use that would play a heavy role in the puzzles and final boss in that particular dungeon, but also expand your arsenal for the remainder of the game.

Though not an RPG, Zelda games had a sense of progression to them.

And there was a momentum that carried you through from the beginning of the narrative to the end.

The sandbox, by contrast, seems to think of such goals as distractions or merely one activity to pursue among many.

In other words, it seemed to me that the expectations I went into Breath of the Wild with - that I would play through an epic story that took me to diverse dungeons and environments, were simply wrong. Instead, the main appeal to the game was just playing around (or, to use more adult and perhaps judgmental language, just fucking around) in the world they provided.

And I don't think that doing so appeals to me. I'm looking for that structure, and for the reward of progression to allow me to see and do new things.

Breath of the Wild begins in a plateau where you get all the tools you're really going to have over the course of the game. You get things like bombs and the time-stop and magnet abilities all at once, because the game makes no assumptions about the order in which you are going to tackle its various challenges. Whereas previous Zelda games could have a first dungeon whose puzzles only involve things you can do with the tool you find within (say, the wind boomerang from the first dungeon in Twilight Princess,) Breath of the Wild, if anything, creates systems that only work inside its major dungeons (like being able to rotate parts of the divine beasts from the map) because they cannot gate things in this manner.

Again, I think that a player who just wants to mess around (which is perhaps a happy medium between my two phrasings) in that world might - and presumably does - see that as a boon. The openness means that nothing really gets in the way of just challenging yourself to do what you want to try to do.

I cannot help but feel like an old fogey, though, in my emotional response that Breath of the Wild has done Zelda dirty - that someone has taken away the series that I loved and replaced it with what is simply a different game.

Now, there are games in that series I didn't like before as well. The previous entry, Skyward Sword, had nearly opposite problems (the restrictiveness of its motion controls and the decidedly non-open world). And I think I would not feel so upset about it if I knew that this was going to be Zelda's experiment with a different kind of structure, similarly to how Wind Waker played its game of island-hopping before returning to a more Ocarina of Time-style world in Twilight Princess (a game I consider probably the second-best entry among the 3D Zelda games - again, a somewhat unpopular opinion).

This, though, is why the approach with Tears of the Kingdom worries me. A gameplay preview showed that this is once again set in a ruined world where weapons break after you swing them a handful of times, and the exciting features being shown off were the ability to assemble a vehicle out of pieces found in the world.

If you love this sandboxy approach, I'm sure this seems amazing and good.

But to me, it shows the Zelda series drifting away from the thing I once loved, and heading instead toward a Minecraft-style game-making tool, rather than a game in and of itself (I meant here to reference an old Chainsawsuit comic, but could not find it).

It's not like simply making a game open-world will always result in this. Elden Ring, by contrast, took the Dark Souls formula and blew it out into a massive explorable world. Elden Ring does suffer from some of the necessary evils of this kind of design - mainly the need to copy-paste tile sets to create its many mini-dungeons - but the game feels like an evolution of that Dark Souls format. Its Legacy Dungeons feel distinct, and it has many unique and interesting creature designs.

Now, I suppose one takeaway here is that this is one of the rare instances of a same-generation Zelda game. Zelda has sometimes been caught in generational transitions - Twilight Princess was meant as the second (and very different) Gamecube Zelda following the polarizing Wind Waker (which I think was only really polarizing because of its cartoonish visual style) but also wound up being a launch title for the Wii. Breath of the Wild was meant as the Wii U entry in the series, but the Wii U was not generally embraced by the public, and so Breath of the Wild became more associated with the newer Switch - a massive success of a console.

But we've seen, for example, Majora's Mask, which came out two years after Ocarina of Time, but was able to accomplish such quick turnaround by replicating a lot of the UI, assets, and overall structure of Ocarina of Time.

So, as someone who does not want to see Breath of the Wild as the immutable model for Zelda games moving forward, I can perhaps take some solace in the notion that Tears of the Kingdom is an attempt to expand out the idea of Breath of the Wild by using some of the systems and assets developed for that game.

Still, despite being a big Zelda fan in my early days as a gamer, I'm finding myself wondering whether I will even get Tears of the Kingdom. And to be clear, I am in no way condemning or complaining about people who are overjoyed to have more BotW-style Zelda to play through (or around in). Frankly, I expect this to be a massive success, and a beloved game to millions of players across the world.

It just means that I've got to accept that Zelda games might no longer be for me. Getting older is weird.

Reminiscing About Skyward Sword

 It has now been ten years since the release of The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword. While Twilight Princess was the first game I got for the Wii, it was actually originally intended as a Gamecube release, so much like Breath of the Wild, there were releases on both consoles. Skyward Sword was the Wii-native game, and was sold with an accessory to allow for more precise motion controls with the Wii-mote, which it used for the precision sword fighting required to beat the game.

To be frank, this was the first Zelda game to really disappoint me. Back when IGN was the dominant force in gaming reviews, Twilight Princess (which had come out about five years earlier) had infamously earned only an 8.8 out of 10 from the site. While that's still a good review, the notion that a Zelda game, and particularly the one to restore the Ocarina of Time-style more mature graphical style after the cartoonish Wind Waker, would be rated so low seemed to be a scandal.

And honestly, I did disagree with its rating of Twilight Princess, which I consider one of my favorite Zelda games ever, right up there next to Ocarina of Time.

Skyward Sword, on the other hand, got a perfect 10 from IGN, which seemed to guarantee an instant classic.

In practice, though, the game was a giant mixed bag.

I've developed a bit of nostalgia for it, in part due to the release of Skyward Sword HD on the Switch, along with catching some of the GDQ videos on Youtube (Games Done Quick is an organization that does speedrunning to promote charities like Doctors Without Borders, and seems really cool.)

Watching these videos, I'm struck by how the game is actually really gorgeous, and makes me wish that I liked it more.

Skyward Sword's reputation did not explode in popularity following its release. There were definitely some cool elements (I think everyone thought the Koloktos fight in the Ancient Cistern dungeon was freaking awesome,) but it suffered from several glaring issues.

I think the worst of these issues was its repetition. Over the course of your adventure, you'd find yourself returning to old areas, doing the same searches for various items that needed to be collected, and you also had to fight The Imprisoned several times. Again, while the artistic design of the game is fantastic - a slightly brighter and more colorful world that nevertheless shares DNA with Twilight Princess - one almost gets the sense that Nintendo didn't have enough time to build out a big enough world.

Skyward Sword has a really cool open world in theory in the form of its Skyworld, where Link can fly between floating earth motes (included among them his home town,) though in practice the real action is not here, but on the surface world, where the regions are divided explicitly between different unconnected areas. It makes the regions feel more like levels than the kind of open, interconnected world that has been part of Zelda from the very beginning.

The motion controls were also a big swing, if you'll pardon the pun. But I think that the level of precision required for it was very taxing for me, and I think a lot of players (notably the Switch version lets you handle the various types of sword swipes through buttons instead.) Motion control was a big part of the Wii's mission statement, but I think that this game actually managed to show off the pitfalls of that focus rather than its strengths, which is a shame.

Now, I'm going to address the fact that I'm very much in the minority as someone who did not love Breath of the Wild. I get that most people think it was a massive achievement, and even might hold it up as the best Zelda game ever (which I consider HERESY! Obviously that's Ocarina of Time, or maybe Link to the Past, though I might just be revealing how old I am now.)

But regardless of where you rank Breath of the Wild in the ranks of Zelda games, I think that Nintendo might have overcompensated in a few ways following the issues with Skyward Sword. As I said before, Skyward Sword had a less open world than previous games in the series. By contrast, Breath of the Wild has by far the most open world of any Zelda game. That's great, but the problem I then had with Breath of the Wild was that its open world feels so empty. Skyward Sword had challenges and puzzles to solve in each of its tightly-packed world regions, whereas the only real barrier to getting anywhere in Breath of the Wild is whether you can climb high enough to drift down to the place you're going.

Because of the low frequency of Zelda games on major consoles, Skyward Sword is also the last game to have unique dungeons packed with enemies and puzzles. One thing I think is relatively uncontroversial about Breath of the Wild is that its "dungeons," the Ancient Beasts, are all pretty boring - somehow separating off monsters from puzzles, and all having the same aesthetic design. Skyward Sword does not actually share that issue - indeed, some of its dungeons are downright cool. I'm a big fan of the Ancient Cistern, not just because of its fantastic final boss, but also the amazing aesthetic of a serene temple above with a cursed and haunted cavern below. And the whip is actually a really cool addition to the standard Zelda item arsenal (something that Breath of the Wild more or less dispensed with.)

As a Zelda fan since 1998, I've sort of struggled to understand why I'm so out of step with people who adore Breath of the Wild. And by no means to I want to suggest that its fans' feelings toward the game are in any way invalid - I just wish that I felt the same way about it.

While I don't think we have a release date yet (and this being Nintendo, who knows when it will come out,) I'm very curious to see to what extent Breath of the Wild II (though I expect it to get its own unique subtitle, much as Majora's Mask was originally announced as Zelda Gaiden) sticks to the previous game's formula.

One thing I find really interesting is how it looks as if the world to explore in the upcoming game will actually be a sky world of sorts, with floating islands that Link will cross the skies to reach - perhaps having a second run at some kind of Skyworld.

I will say that I would like to see another Zelda game with the bright colors of Skyward Sword. Breath of the Wild's more subdued pastel look does make sense given the ruined world you traverse, but I'm hoping for them to change things up.

Also, as a note (this is kind of just scattered Zelda thoughts at this point,) among those GDQ videos I saw was a run of Ocarina of Time 3D for the 3DS. It's really funny how when you see an update of a game you played long ago with more modern graphics, it often actually looks the way you remember it, because you sort of updated the graphics in your mind's eye. I do think the Shadow Temple in particular looks way better in that remake - it was one I always felt was a little dull in the original N64 version. It reminds me of how when I played Shadow of the Colossus' remaster for the PS4 I couldn't really tell the difference from my memories. Perhaps because I never played Demon Souls, the remake on the PS5 to me looks insanely good - maybe because I'm thinking of it as a next-gen game instead of a remake of a 12-year-old one.

Nintendo News out of E3 - Metroid Dread and Breath of the Wild 2

 First, as a disclaimer, this isn't going to be a comprehensive list of all the announcements coming from Nintendo.

First off, there's a new teaser for the direct sequel to The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. BotW was massively popular, and so it's not a terrible shock to see a direct sequel (though it didn't come as rapidly as Majora's Mask did after Ocarina of Time.) The new teaser shows the land of Hyrule uprooted, resembling a bit more of the open skies of Skyward Sword, where islands of land float in the air, and Link flies between them.

As I've said before, I find myself feeling somewhat out of touch about Breath of the Wild, as I ultimately thought the game failed to deliver a satisfying experience - I guess I like a little more plot and a little more specificity in the dungeon environments and monsters to fight. And I hated how the weapons broke after five uses, and how tedious cooking was.

Really, though, my biggest problem with BotW was the way that it suffered from the same problems a lot of open-world games do - too much of it felt generic. Every dungeon had the same aesthetic, every mini-puzzle-dungeon could have been swapped for any other location, with the same ancient-sci-fi look inside. And while the expansive world was breathtaking, every corner of it had the same Bokoblins, Moblins, and Lizalfos, perhaps in different colors.

But I'm an old fogey who hasn't really loved a main console release of a Zelda game since Twilight Princess, so what do I know?

I'd love to do discover that BotW2 will address some of these issues, but we'll see.

Next, we've got Metroid Dread. Dread is not the announced-but-slowly-coming Metroid Prime 4. Instead, it's a return to the series' side-scrolling roots, but with a fully modern graphical style. Apparently a big part of the game involves Samus outrunning some nigh-indestructible robots called "EMMI," while exploring an alien world.

The footage looks pretty good, and at least what was playable at this announcement looked fairly solid.

Obviously, there are a ton of other stories coming out of E3, but these seemed to warrant mention.

Positive Versus Negative Accomplishments in Games

Though it feels like a decade, it's actually only been about three years since the release of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. A lot of things have, obviously, happened since then. On a personal level, my mom died just a few months later, and more recently and less individually, the world has been rocked by a devastating pandemic, which has killed more Americans than the Vietnam War in just a couple months (revisiting this post in a year or so, that number may even seem surprisingly low.)

This is a game that got nearly universal praise, critical acclaim, and I believe outsold Ocarina of Time, the "Seven Samurai" of video games (because it's frequently and not terribly controversially considered the greatest example of its medium of all time) by a factor of two.

And I didn't really like it.

Don't get me wrong: the game is beautiful, and I played it for many hours, enjoying the various things I could do in it. But I also always felt as if it had succumbed a bit to the "open world curse" - namely, that by filling a massive map with myriad things to do, the game suffered from a sort of sameiness in its challenges. Going to a new location like a sun-baked desert or a snow-covered mountainside, you still found all the same sorts of things and the same sorts of monsters. To me, it killed some of the excitement of cresting that next hill or delving into that distant forest because, well, I know all that I would face there would be more of the same. And the interchangeability of the various puzzle shrines was, similarly, a reason for me to be less invested in discovering what lay within.

So I find myself wondering why, to so many people, this was a transcendental, mind-blowing, legendary experience. When so many people are enamored with something, you start to wonder if the problem is in you.

Growing up, I didn't actually have a video game console until I was 10, saving up allowance money to get myself an SNES. The next year, I did the same for a used N64 (I think I might have convinced my parents to come up with other tasks for me to earn the cash for them.) Ironically, the only video game console I ever got as a gift from a parent was a Nintendo Switch in 2018, when I was 32.

So the first Zelda game I ever got was Ocarina of Time (I remember having to convince my mom that it wasn't too violent for 12-year-old me when it came out). I'd later get Majora's Mask, and then A Link to the Past, Wind Waker, Twilight Princess, Skyward Sword, and eventually Breath of the Wild, and then the recent Switch remake of Link's Awakening. To me, Ocarina of Time and Link to the Past were the really formative ones, and I loved Twilight Princess even as reviews had been sort of underwhelmed by it.

I remember one of my big accomplishments in Ocarina of Time was that I got all 20 heart containers, which I also accomplished in A Link to the Past. Zelda games tended to have these collectables - you didn't have to get every last one to beat the game, but you'd feel a certain sense of accomplishment if you managed it.

And I suspect that might be part of what didn't work for me with Breath of the Wild.

There's a sense that you can get in some games when it comes to these "extra credit" accomplishments. Take a totally different game: The Prince of Persia: The Warrior Within. Playing through the game, it's relatively linear, but you can occasionally find little hidden puzzle/obstacle course areas that will increase your maximum health (not unlike heart containers.) Throughout the game, you are hunted by a monster called the Dahaka - an embodiment of time that wishes to punish you for messing with the flow of time in the first game in that trilogy (The Sands of Time). In Warrior Within, you eventually fight against the... Lady of Time? Priestess... I don't remember what she's called, but she's the final boss, and by killing her, you find a way to change time or something. But what I hadn't realized when playing through it is that, if you got every health upgrade, you'd get the Water Sword, which then allowed you to save the priestess lady and instead fight the Dahaka itself - leading to a totally different ending.

My feeling after realizing that wasn't so much that I'd beaten the game and that there was more that I could get in an earlier playthrough, but rather that I'd actually failed the first time, and that I'd gotten the "bad" ending.

I've definitely got a perfectionist streak in me. And unfortunately, that makes me feel that when I don't do things quite perfectly, it's a failure.

Going back to Zelda, then, I think perhaps part of what I didn't like about Breath of the Wild was that, ultimately, I was just not going to get to do everything in it. Sure, I beat the four bosses in the corners of the world, but the game seems to resist allowing for "perfection." You can get the absolute best weapons and shields, but you're not going to be able to hold onto them, as they'll break eventually in an unrecoverable way.

Items are meant to be used up, chewed up, and replaced in Breath of the Wild, and it's hard for me to accept that on an emotional level. Accomplishments are temporary, for the most part.

Now, I stand by my criticisms about the sameiness of the monsters and the shrines, but I do wonder if I'd enjoy it more going in with fewer expectations. Letting the game be what it is, and not getting bogged down by what I feel I should be accomplishing in it.

There is a Breath of the Wild 2 coming, though I think we could see a different name (unlike Final Fantasy, I don't see Nintendo getting really into sub-series for Zelda) and I wonder if I'll do better approaching that with a new attitude.

At the same time, though, I also hope that we'll see some Zelda games more in the vein of Ocarina of Time/Twilight Princess again.

Link's Awakening

I never had any Gameboy. The Switch is really the first mobile gaming platform I've ever had (not counting an iPhone, which to be fair is actually a pretty substantial part of that field.)

The first Zelda game I ever got was Ocarina of Time - I would later get Link to the Past in college, despite having had an SNES since I was 10. While now, 21 years later, being first introduced to a game series at 12 feels pretty lifelong, I nevertheless felt like a bit of a newcomer.

Zelda is, I'd argue, Nintendo's most prestigious franchise. While Mario is obviously the headliner, he's also far more saturated - you can expect multiple Mario games per console generation. With Zelda, you tend to get one or two. The Wii U (which I think already stands as Nintendo's "forgotten console") technically had Breath of the Wild (that's the platform I have it on,) but much as Twilight Princess was a launch title for the Wii despite also being available on the Gamecube, Breath of the Wild feels more tied to the success of the Switch.

Zelda games are events. And as someone for whom Ocarina of Time is pretty hardwired into me as one of the most important games I've ever played, it's been kind of sad for me to say that I actually haven't really loved a Zelda game since Twilight Princess. Skyward Sword was too repetitive and disconnected - even if it had some really cool ideas - and Breath of the Wild is one of those games that has me feeling like I've gone insane given how passionately people love it when, to me, it abandons a ton of the things that I feel makes Zelda games Zelda games.

So it's kind of interesting to play Link's Awakening.

Released on the Gameboy, this was the fourth Zelda game, between A Link to the Past and Ocarina of Time. In a lot of ways, the game was an attempt to shrink down the style established in Link to the Past to a game that can work on the Gameboy. It's actually kind of funny to me to think now that, given how different the original Zelda was and especially how different Adventure of Link was, that LttP and Link's Awakening are actually the only 2D Zelda games of what I think of as the "classic Zelda" style (actually, that's not necessarily true, given the other Gameboy games that came out later, like Oracle of Ages/Seasons and such, which I have not played but could also be of that style.)

The remake of Link's Awakening is sort of fascinating, then, in that (I'm given to understand) it really, quite purely, just recreates the 1993 game as it existed, but with modern graphics, sounds, and a few control elements to make it easier to play (taking advantage of the larger number of buttons to give the sword and shield dedicated inputs, for example.)

In the classic Zelda vein, you're presented with a world that you get to explore more fully as you gain new items. The sword lets you cut through bushes, there's a feather that lets you jump over holes, and, and you get bracers that let you lift rocks out of the way.

The map is very grid-like, in that old style, but given how very easy it is for the Switch to load the entire map, they do away with the one-square-at-a-time transition between locations except when it makes sense to do so - like if there's a chamber with doors.

Now, I'd been given to understand that Link's Awakening had a very weird, even Lynchian, tone to it, but so far I've only seen a couple of hints at that. I'm two dungeons into the game, having just opened up a third (but I need to find a way to get to its entrance.)

In terms of challenge, it's definitely not too bad - and I wonder if the smoother controls on the Switch have made it easier than it would be on the original two-button Gameboy.

But in terms of the recreation, the art style of the remake is utterly charming. The world is rendered in plastic-toy-like simplicity - a modern take on repetitive sprites of the early 2D era. But also portraying it almost like a play-set with your camera looking down toward it, the foreground and background blur slightly. The soundtrack has some classic Zelda music, but it's also arranged simplistically, giving it a light tone in keeping with the art style.

As someone who is a bit nostalgic for older Zelda games and on top of that never played the original version of Link's Awakening, this is actually pretty ideal for me.

Naturally, I'll be looking forward to Breath of the Wild 2 with interest (unless they change the name, this would, I think, be the first Zelda game to be a part two of something that's technically already a part X.) It's not that I disliked BotW, but I think I just missed some of the elements that it cut out - and felt like for all the freedom that the game gave you, it also made things feel a little more like a generic open-world game than Zelda is supposed to be.

Nintendo Announcements at E3 2019

As you might be aware, there's a big gaming convention going on. I'm not going to go exhaustively into every announcement - I recommend checking out whatever your preferred gaming news site is, but I figured I'd mention some things that caught my eye from Nintendo.

Zelda:

First off, there was a tease for a sequel to Breath of the Wild. While I don't know if it will be the same mechanically, it does appear to be a new Zelda game with the same graphical style.

BotW is a game I have mixed feelings about. On one hand, I appreciate the sense of play and exploration, and the sweeping majesty of its game world. But I also think that its game world fell into a bit of a "samey-ness" trap that open-world games often suffer from. It's all well and good to go from deserts to forests to snowy mountains, but when every dungeon and shrine looks the same once you go underground, it kind of takes the fun out of it. Also, I think if every sword, bow, and shield had about ten times the durability, it might have felt less annoying to see them break.

I'll be very curious to see if they keep the survival/resource feel of the previous game or give us a more traditional Zelda experience.

Also, the remake of Link's Awakening will have a custom dungeon editor.

Smash Bros. Ultimate Fighters:

As someone who very eagerly got the Smash Pass, I'm pretty happy to see two new fighters announced as DLC.

First, and to me, more exciting, is Banjo-Kazooie. This Bear with a Bird in his backpack debuted originally in Diddy Kong Racing, a game that took Donkey Kong's sidekick and then gave us a bunch of potential new IPs for Rareware back when Rare was one of the greatest video game studios. Among the roster, only Banjo and, hilariously, Conker (whose initial kid-friendly game was scrapped in favor of an irreverent one that was more Fritz than Felix) wound up getting their own 3D platformers.

Additionally, they'll be getting "The Hero," which represents the various protagonists of the prolific Dragon Quest series (which I think has been around as long as Final Fantasy but for some reason I've never talked with anyone who has ever played them.)

Mana Collection:

Secret of Mana holds a very special place in my heart - my oldest friend and I used to play in endlessly when we were in middle school, the only Squaresoft RPG that you could play co-op. Three of the games in the Mana series, including Secret of Mana, will be getting released as a collection, including one previously never released in America. Additionally, that unreleased game, now given an english title of Trials of Mana, is also getting a 3D remake coming next year.

Luigi's Mansion:

I've actually never played any of the Luigi's Mansion games, but there's a new one coming to the Switch. Cool! It apparently lets you turn into, at points, "Gooigi," which is a Luigi made of goo that can slime its way along walls and such.

Anyway, there's way more news even from Nintendo, but those are the highlights I'm most interested in.

Reminder: Ballad of the Goddess is just Zelda's Lullaby Backwards

It's been several years since The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword came out. We're now in year three, I think, of Breath of the Wild being the most recent Zelda game.

I'll confess that I didn't like Skyward Sword as much as I wanted to (actually same with Breath of the Wild) but there is one element that I really find awesome:

Skyward Sword's big musical theme, its main title as it were, is the Ballad of the Goddess:

It's a stirring, heroic piece of music that really seems like a great call to adventure.

But there's a secret to it (read the title of the post if you want a spoiler): The main musical phrase of it is actually just Zelda's Lullaby reversed. No change in pace or rhythm. You can literally just reverse the song and you'll hear Zelda's Lullaby.

I still find this mind-blowing. The two melodies sound so profoundly different, despite being exact mirror images of one another.

I do not know much about music theory, so maybe someone else could explain how this works, but it feels really magical.

And it plays into the story of the game:

Spoilers ahead for an 8ish-year-old game:

Skyward Sword is the earliest-set Zelda game chronologically. While Ocarina of Time had been the "prequel game" back in the day, telling us how the dark lord Ganon became the horrible pig-demon he is, Skyward Sword goes pre-Ganon, pre-Hyrule world where the Goddess Hylia actually raised a kingdom into the sky so that it could be safe of the dangers on the surface.

We eventually discover that Zelda, Link's childhood friend, is in fact an incarnation of the Goddess - which then goes on to explain how Zelda has shown up generations later in different lives. All this time she was the Goddess Hylia!

And so the Ballad of the Goddess sharing the same notes as Zelda's Lullaby makes sense: it's the same song about the same individual.

Breath of the Wild - Open World Zelda: Is That a Good Thing or a Bad Thing?

Breath of the Wild famously breaks the Zelda formula that has arguably been in place since a Link to the Past. Zelda games have generally had a pretty clear linear progression, with a formula of doing a build up of quest-like tasks that would lead you into a new dungeon, after which you would defeat a boss and then, using the new weapon or tool found in that dungeon, be able to go onto the next.

In Breath of the Wild, you start in a sort of kiddie-pool area (though combat is legitimately tougher than most Zelda games have been, so it's not like it's super-easy) where you get access to the puzzle-solving tools you'll need for the rest of the journey almost immediately.

Once you get access to the parasail, you'll be able to go pretty much anywhere in the world, and while I do feel pretty strongly that you're pushed to go to the eastern part of the map first, there's nothing stopping you from going in other directions.

There are four major dungeon-like structures, but they don't really work totally like dungeons. Combat and puzzles are somewhat more segregated - with shrines found throughout the world that serve both as teleportation nodes (along with Assassin's Creed-style map-revealing towers) and also serve as explicit "there are puzzles here" locations that award Spirit Orbs - which work mostly like Heart Pieces did in prior games (though you can also trade them in for more stamina to let you climb and run and glide longer.)

The world of Breath of the Wild is desolate. There are people - in fact, beyond the many towns you find you'll also come across little stables that serve as country inns - but the plot is all about how things basically fell apart a hundred years ago. Link - explicitly named Link in this entry, rather than that just being the default name - actually has a history, but his 100-year slumber (an emergency procedure after he took an otherwise fatal wound) has left him an amnesiac.

So you actually wind up with a few checklist items pretty early on that you can work on for the rest of the game - recovering important memories and restoring the massive Divine Beasts to bring the fight against Ganon (and give you some very useful combat powers.)

There's incredible freedom - a lot of games tout the ability to go anywhere, but in this game, with the generous (but stamina-limited) climbing, you really can get to just about anywhere you see. And also, the draw-distance more or less makes the entire game world visible (admirably without making it seem small.)

This is a game about survival, and as such a lot of the things you used to be able to count on in a Zelda game are no longer true. Simply smashing pots and cutting down grass won't get you hearts to recover your health. Instead, you'll find tons of fruits, vegetables, and meats in the world that you can cook into food. Cooking is pretty fun (you can experiment with different ingredients, though eventually you'll figure out a relatively straightforward formula) but you'll need to do a lot of it if you want to really stock up on health-replenishing items before going into a tough fight or area. As funky as the little cooking music is, this can get a little tedious.

Likewise, your weapons are not built to last. Granted, we tend to expect way more from video game weapons than their real-world counterparts (there's no way that an actual broadsword would be able to take the punishment your average WoW weapon does without breaking after like three fights,) but in Breath of the Wild, until you get the Master Sword (which itself will power-down if you use it against anything but the most obviously corrupted stuff after a while, giving it a recharge period) you'll be churning through weapons. You can strategically use weaker weapons when facing easier opponents, but just remember that nothing lasts, so don't be precious.

The open-world nature of Breath of the Wild does give you incredible freedom, but I do think you pay a bit of a price. The dungeons and shrines wind up feeling somewhat same-y. There's a lot of stuff in the open world that feels pretty unique (when you find the Lost Woods it definitely feels different) but the nonlinear nature of the progression means that a lot of the bokoblin and moblin camps kind of feel interchangeable.

There's also the fact that you have so much freedom in when you take things to Ganon that the pacing gets odd. For example, in my first play through I've found myself gravitating toward the Divine Beasts, and I left home in the middle of my fourth (the camel one in the desert.) I know there's a ton more to the game, but because everything has to be doable in any order, it means that you can burn through a lot of the "main event" stuff and then find yourself with a ton of side-missions (even if they're interesting side missions. I haven't even begun to explore Faron, for example) and a kind of nagging question of where it's time to just go and fight Ganon.

I really like the game, but I think I might have liked a more curated, guided tour of this iteration of Hyrule. The open-world aspects are arguably the fulfillment of the genre that Zelda spawned, but in embracing this freedom, the game also feels a bit more like other open-world games in ways that are perhaps not terrible, but not inspiring either.

Breath of the Wild: "Dungeons" and Resources

Traditionally, in a Zelda game, you smash pots or cut grass to replenish your health and supplies. Zelda never had a rebounding health meter the way some games did, but healing up didn't take a lot of effort, and getting things like arrows after you ran out was not the most difficult task.

In Breath of the Wild, you need to conserve like crazy. Even the important weapons that you get from beating major bosses will break after a bit of use. Link is constantly picking up new stuff, and if you go into a dungeon, you're going to want to have supplies - not just arrows and a full arsenal of weapons, but also good food to heal up with.

Cooking takes time, and sometimes you find that all the standard ingredients - apples, mushrooms, etc. - are out and all you have is the makings for some kind of buff elixir - which are fine, but not what you want to see when you're looking at a very small number of hearts left.

Breath of the Wild is not linear. I've been following what seems like the natural path - I went to the Zora and helped them get the Elephant Divine Beast online again and then headed north to Death Mountain to help out the Gorons and their Salamander thing. For all I know, the game steers you in this direction, or it's possible that I could have just gone west after Kakariko Village and done entirely different things.

The Ancient Beasts serve, I assume, as Breath of the Wild's main dungeons. These massive constructs (the open world of BotW recalls Shadow of the Colossus, and these beasts certainly seem of a similar style to the Colossi) must first be neutralized, which seems to be a unique quest chain for each, and then you go inside and solve puzzles.

While there are little bits of corruption to fight inside the Beasts, dungeons in Breath of the Wild are really puzzle-focused. Fighting is for the outdoors, and you'll get plenty of combat against Bokoblins and Moblins (and other things, though it's mostly, at least so far, those guys) as you explore.

While the Divine Beasts are almost entirely puzzle-based, they each end with a boss fight. Strategies are actually a bit less obvious in this game, given that you have all the "tool" abilities pretty much from the moment you leave the starting area.

Restoring a Divine Beast to order will not only bring its aid against Ganon, but you'll also get a passive effect based on the champion who piloted it a century ago. These seem like pretty powerful bonuses, which really incentivizes you to get those beasts, even though technically I think you can actually go straight to Ganon pretty early in the game.

I do have a little worry that I'm focusing too much on the main quest. In open-world games (and to an extent Zelda games have always been open-world games. You could argue they were the first major example of the genre) I am often driven to see the plot and not get overwhelmed by the many, many side activities one can do. With two major bosses down after having the game for only a day and a half, I do want to stop and smell the roses a bit. I guess the question is which roses first.

First Impressions of Zelda: Breath of the Wild

So I got it for the Wii U. Don't get me wrong: I really want the Switch to succeed. But right now it's hard for me to justify getting a console for which there's really just one game I want. And my Wii U library's pretty thin as it is, so it's nice to get another entry there.

Moving on to the actual game:

Breath of the Wild is and isn't Zelda as you know it. The plot and art style is totally in keeping with Nintendo's traditions. But Breath of the Wild is somewhat more like an RPG than previous Zelda games have been. Weapons have stats and you'll burn through them really quickly. I imagine at some point you'll get the Master Sword and perhaps that one will either never break or be repairable, but for now, any given weapon lasts for a few fights at most. Thankfully, the enemies you fight often drop their own weapons (at least in these early hours, about four out of five things you fight are Bokoblins, who carry a variety of weapons.) So you're basically going to cycle through these things.

Rupees and Hearts are also tougher to come by. Recovering health is all about gathering food and cooking it. Cooking has plenty of benefits. In the kiddie-pool area (something I clearly did not explore fully because when my friend was playing it he found a named boss enemy in the wilds there) you'll find one snowy area where you take cold damage from the environment, but you also have a number of hot peppers that you can find there which, when cooked with other ingredients (actually, maybe by themselves as well) you can get food that gives you a couple minutes of cold resistance, which is just about enough to get you where you need to go.

One of the other breaks with tradition is that this Link is already a hero of legend. 100 years ago, Link (and it's explicitly Link, not "insert your name here") was Princess Zelda's chosen knight, and after being fatally wounded by Calamity Ganon (which seems like a much more elemental force than an individual) he was sealed away in a kind of stasis chamber. When he wakes up at the very start of the game, Link has no memories - only the voice of Zelda in his head.

I'm only a few hours in, but I believe that Breath of the Wild doesn't technically have dungeons. There are four Ancient Beasts that I suspect will serve as the major bosses, but the world is really wide open pretty early on. This game stresses survival and exploration. And the world is freaking enormous.

While much of the game actually has the open spaces that might remind you of Shadow of the Colossus, you're not actually alone here. There are a few towns and NPCs scattered about, and you'll actually have an honest-to-Hylia quest log.

But while there are waypoints that will tell you the general direction of where to go, you're going to need to do some exploring and strategizing to get there.

I think I'd still be playing now if my Wii U controller hadn't run out of batteries. I'm certain I'll post more about this game as I play through it.

A Nintendo Loyalist's Conundrum - Zelda: Breath of the Wild

We waited a long time for Twilight Princess.

During the Gamecube era, Nintendo announced there would be a new Zelda game after Wind Waker. I did eventually play Wind Waker, which actually deserves a little more credit than teenager me wanted to give it (this was an era when Pokemon was exploding in popularity and Nintendo was being seen as the "little kid" video game company, which as a teenager was something I resented - you know, like how teenagers suck? Anyway, the graphic style of Wind Waker was not the for-the-time high-rez Zelda game that the tech demos for the Gamecube seemed to have promised.)

Twilight Princess wound up being a launch title for the Wii, but it was also released on the Gamecube (actually later I think,) and sort of left those with Gamecubes in a conundrum of whether they wanted to invest in the new system or play it on the old one.

Personally, Twilight Princess is up there in maybe my top three Zelda games (Ocarina of Time and Link to the Past being in the top two spots, though I vacillate on which order to put them in.) I love the style and dungeon design, and I find it pretty ironic in retrospect that it got such underwhelming reviews while Skyward Sword was given sweeping 10/10s.

I wound up getting a Wii and Twilight Princess as my first game for it.

Now, we wound up getting a truly Wii-centric Zelda game in Skyward Sword, which I didn't actually wind up liking as much.

Now we're in a kind of similar state with the Wii U and the Switch.

The Wii U seemed like a great idea at the time, and Nintendo came out with some cool concepts for it. But ultimately, it feels like half a system. I realize it's been almost five years since it came out, which is kind of average for a console generation (the fact that it seems short must mean I'm getting older) but there was just never a big library for it. Even Nintendo didn't really seem to fully believe in it, with first and second party games from big franchises never appearing. Unless I'm really missing something we never got a Metroid game for the Wii U.

But while Nintendo will put out tons of Mario games, Zelda is something that is typically once or twice in a console generation - but it's always there.

Breath of the Wild was supposed to be a Wii U game (I think you even get a tablet in-game that is kind of a proxy for the Wii U controller,) but now it's basically the reason to get a Switch.

I have such fond feelings for Nintendo, and if the reviews are to be believed, the company can still come out with utterly amazing games. They are a seriously quality over quantity company, which I respect (to be honest, I think that these days I'm much happier to have one game I play for a long time than a bunch of games I can cycle through. Like a certain MMORPG that dominates this blog.)

But I also feel a little burned by the Wii U. The Wii U concept was much less gimicky in my opinion than the Wii (ok, it had more gimicks, but it was still giving you something recognizable as a video game controller) but a system is nothing without a good library.

So right now, they want people to roll the dice on the Switch, and for the record, I really, really hope the console is a huge success for them. But this early on, I'm hesitant to plunk down for a new console (especially since I just got a PS4 last year) with only one game I'm super excited to play.