I also feel very poor in the game. Rupees are bloody hard to come by, right?

regmcfly wrote:

I also feel I'm too thick to do some side quests.

Tears of the Kingdom - most emasculating game 2023.

One area the Ubisoft version improved on was at least marking an area that you’d be looking for

tin_robot wrote:

Firstly, I'd have preferred it if the Depths were smaller.  There are various places where they are very self contained, and I liked those patches more than the long periods fumbling in the darkness.  Alternatively, it might have helped if they weren't so readily accessible early on.

yourfavouriteuncle wrote:

They nailed open world Zelda first time, this adds layers of convolution which has massively watered down my experience. Hey ho, I’m glad I tried.

I think they had an idea so good, they couldn't let it go. A underworld that's a twisted mirror of the surface world. Where all shrines are connected to roots, and where discoveries in one area lead to discoveries in the other. Just like in Zeldas past. But it seems like the surface is just too big for that to be practical. It should be smaller, self-contained, more curated areas, and access to them, like the sky islands, gated until the player is powerful enough to reach them. No bloody red goo either. It's simply there to slow you down and piss you off.  

The Sky Islands aren't exactly littered with variety. But I really liked exploring them and the challenge of reaching them. Two or three times I just made it, grabbing the last bit of the underside of the island with just enough stamina to climb to the top, or finding a ledge to ascend through.

I don't think I've ever been more sick to death of a game in my life, and that's saying something. For every moment of fun, there's about 15 really shitty moments that just infuriate me. I feel like I've easily wasted 30 odd hours putting up with complete bullshit, especially in the Depths. It has moments of genius, spliced with bonkers design decisions and a stubborn refusal to move mechanics forward from BotW.

The Daddy wrote:

Meanwhile I’ve loved every minute of the 80+ hours I’ve spent playing this.

Hmm I suspect there’s a few hours in there of
Unskippable bullshit you could have done with out

Nintendo's insistence on keeping literally everything exactly as it was in BotW in terms of music, sound effects, menu navigation etc, has soured the game sooner than it should've. Hearing that Game Over jingle more than twice in 10 minutes is enough for me to dump it.

Ultrahand and Autobuild are inspired videogame design ideas, but I rarely feel the need to bother with any of their potential. Outside shrines, I feel most of the building stuff isn't required because of the abundance of fast travel points on the sky islands - you can get pretty much anywhere from up there. Unless you wanna get the hard to reach stuff right up high, you don't need to bother with it at all. Once you've got a hoverbike sorted that's about all you need for anything out of reach. It becomes acutely boring to waste 10 minutes in the depths making something you think will take you places, only for it to plummet into the darkness after 10 seconds never to be seen again. Building a war machine is fun the first time, but the rewards for laying waste to enemy camps just isn't worth the effort doing it repeatedly.

But the combat above all has become just intolerable. There are a thousand things you can fuse to an arrow, but about 4 of them are actually of any use. There's no way to bookmark favourites other than most used, which is fucking bonkers. The melee combat is so bad I try to avoid it as much as possible and clearing those camps in the depths is an insufferable experience. The weapon degradation is actively worse in this than BotW, and you're forever swapping out stuff whenever you pick up anything new. The game is forcing you into menus at every turn, and it just stunts the whole experience for me.

It's still one of the best games ever made, but I am so done with this iteration of Zelda, and I doubt I'll ever even finish it.

I definitely don't want a third one like this.

The master sword thing was baffling. I just stumbled across it. No quest, nothing.

Edit: @Chalice

There are at least two quest lines that lead you to it - it's just that it also happens to be there if you stumble upon it.  
I think the general approach in this and BotW is that there's nothing you can't just go straight to from the start if you either know where you're going or happen to stumble on it whilst exploring enough.

*Spoilers for the end of the game*

Ultrahand

This game would be worth the money for the shrines alone to be fair.

monkey wrote:

I definitely don't want a third one like this.

yourfavouriteuncle wrote:

That’s what you’re getting though.

Yeah. I know. They're not dropping this engine for a good long time.

It'll be an upscale to 480p, still 15fps, 50 quid.

Would love to see how staunchly fans would defend a same map decision a second time if BotW3 arrives in 2029. But it has time travel and masks as well!

BotW but you have to have 100 friends over to beat Ganon.