Tears of the Kingdom leaked.

[Eric]

It's glorious, that is all.

[Eric]

So from what I've....heard.....No major spoilers.

This game is basically Breath of the Wild 2. Starts the same way as BotW, you run around a small area, unlock your core gimmick abilities, finish that area then you can explore the world. World is relatively the same as last time, but a little remixed because of the event that happens at the start of the game + the sky islands they've added, Nintendo did a neat trick to keep the islands as far as humanly possible from Hyrule on the ground so that you don't have performance issues regardless of where you are.

Most of BotW's gameplay gimmicks are here, weapon destruction, food making, the fun environmental gimmicks with fire and explosions. They actually doubled down on weapon destruction because I swear...from what I've seen from the leaks that I totally haven't played, you go through weapons 2x faster then you did in BotW1.

I like the build and stick gimmick power, but I like it more for simple puzzles as opposed to making vehicles to get around. The game kind of encourages you to make things by leaving piles of building materials littered around the map. Sometimes for a specific puzzle, other times just to build things you might have fun building, I think this is where my older brain kicks in and I don't really see the fun in that, I'm sure kids that love Minecraft and junk will love this gimmick though.

Anything else I have to say about it is a bit spoilery, so I'll shut up until the rest of you join in in about a week.

[Oracle]

The release date of this one snuck up on me! Need to finish XBC3 DLC asap.

I always dread getting into Zelda games. But once the burn in period is done, it's worth it.

[Eric]

https://www.metacritic.com/game/switch/ ... he-kingdom

Review scores are strong, as expected of a Zelda title! Enjoy tomorrow everyone. :^)

[Julius Seeker]

Durability never bothered me. But I will admit that I pictured Link as being something like Michelle Yeoh in Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon where she keeps picking up a new weapon after her old ones break, and is kickass in battle with it… and I probably did that on over 700 occasions.

One thing that really excites me about the game is the whole idea crafting together different things to see what can be done in the world. Nintendo seems to be doing well when it comes to integrating sandbox style gameplay. In Breath of the Wild it was mostly just a consequence of having all the tools, while this time it’s the point. The Trine series did something similar, except as 2D platformers. Breath of the Wild really blew open world design out of the water with their philosophy: basically, they designed it in such a way that players would have generally have X amount of things in sight that would be potential goals: Shrines, forts, settlements of some sort, and then the towers and major monuments that could be seen in the distances. This would have the player constantly finding stuff to do along the way.

There are a couple of things I’m not enthusiastic about. First, the floating islands. Don’t get me wrong, I love floating islands as a setting - Skies of Arcadia is one of my favourite games of all time - but I was so in love with the wide open world to explore, and the islands look segregated. Second, I’m not a big fan of overly long maze-like underground dungeons anymore, and apparently there is a lot of that in Tears of the Kingdom. Part of what I liked about Breath of the Wild is they were getting away from that, having much more to do on the open world. They didn’t get rid of the puzzles, but rather added them in their own little compartments, it was a lot better than running around huge dungeons trying to figure out what to do next. Everyone loves the Forest Temple in Ocarina of Time—to me, that’s a condemnation of long dungeon design because it’s one of the shortest main dungeons in 3D Zelda. I just don’t have time for that stuff anymore. Playing old Final Fantasy games, even the longer dungeons in those games rarely take more than 20 minutes—I think FF4’s final dungeon may have been the only one I played that did, and even that one is relatively tiny compared to some of the beasts in the 3D Zelda series. I like the Witcher 3 elf ruin design, while it’s a little monotonous in its artistic style, they’re more or less straight forward, and there were only two that felt overly long (the early Keira Mets cave, and later on when travelling with Philippa toward the end of the game)… and even those were fairly average in time compared to 3D Zelda.

The maze-dungeon design works well in 2D games where you can navigate 20-30 rooms in about 10 minutes, but in 3D games that might be 2-3 rooms, or even just 1. It’s something I was glad to see heavily reduced in Breath of the Wild, but unhappy to see make a return rather than wiped out completely.

In other words, I love the overworld experience of Breath of the Wild, and I like the quick Shrine challenges that don’t have the player wandering for 20-45 minutes in fiery nonsense to make sure they’re in the right spot. I’d rather spend 20 minutes trying to launch boulders correctly than most of what 3D Zelda dungeon design is about.

[Eric]

Save for the first huge Sky Island the game starts you out on, the Sky Islands might as well be considered shrines you go there for a singular purporse, and it's pretty apparent once you've found the thing the game wants you to find you can dip!

You shouldn't worry too much about the wandering in the bigger dungeons, like you're a veteran gamer, you know 1 + 1 = 2, you can see pretty clearly where all the little nooks and crannies are in the dungeons and what's important and what isn't.

[Eric]

Any updated thoughts Seeker? How'd you feel about

Spoiler: show

The Underworld

[Julius Seeker]

Any updated thoughts Seeker? How'd you feel about

Spoiler: show

The Underworld

I still haven’t played it, but I do love that element in FF4, so we’ll see.

Yeah, I’m a bad Nintendo fan. One of the biggest games of all time and I’ve opted to continue my Final Fantasy marathon, first.

[Oracle]

I've played it for a couple hours, but can't seem to bring myself back to it. Not that I doubt it's awesome, but I went through this a bit with BotW. Just gotta find some time to get *in* to the game.

[Eric]

I made the executive decision to never play BotW again after I beat it once, it helped me a great deal getting back into the swing of things with this game. They're great games, but they're so overwhelming gigantic that I can't bring myself to play through them again lol.

[Julius Seeker]

I limit big games that require 45m+ play sessions (BotW, Xeno, Witcher) to weekends… but try to make a point to play one at least every Sunday (unless I’m doing an FF marathon).

[Julius Seeker]

Nintendo just released sales data.
Tears of the Kingdom sold an astonishing 18.51 million copies by the end of June, or the first 6-7 weeks on the market, making it one of the top 3 fastest selling console games in history and the fastest selling game on a single platform during the first 6 weeks.

Another milestone by Breath of the Wild, which sold 850,000 units in the last quarter, has surpassed 30 million (now 30.65m). It’ll be interesting to see how much Tears of the Kingdom closes the gap by the end of the holiday season. All in all, The Legend of Zelda franchise is seeing new heights on the Switch.

[Eric]

I still mourn some other franchises, but I'm glad Zelda bounced back after Skyward Sword.

I hope they don't get too stuck on the new formula though, as much as I enjoyed these Switch Zeldas I'm not completely in love with the broken sandbox gimmick being all that Zelda is going forward for the mainline entries.

[Julius Seeker]

Perhaps Zelda will expand in the next generation. It would be interesting to see a few sub-franchises like Mario, Dragon Quest, Final Fantasy, and Pokémon have done.

[Eric]

Honesty I just miss music in the overworld lol. There was something very special in the older games when you entered one of the new zones and the music would swell or welcome you into the area that both BotW & TotK are both missing(Minus Hyrule Castle having a pretty gnarly theme).

It's not like Zelda doesn't have sub-series, that Hyrule Warriors game did fairly well no?

[Julius Seeker]

Yeah, I wasn’t even thinking about that one. There was also the remake of Link’s Awakening which is functionally a sub-game of the main series, even in the original’s time, a spin-off. There was also that Cadence of Hyrule game.

I’m definitely alright relegating overworld music to specific encounters, locations, and situations after playing Xenoblade Chronicles X which had music blasting continuously, and was probably my biggest annoyance with the game - even over the tiny fonts. I also like the focus on ambiance in games where players spend a long time in the overworld. GTA, perhaps, did it the best where you can drive around and change radio channels while making sure to pay attention to the environmental ambiance. Maybe if the Sheika invent magic radios and fuse them to every horse?

The thing about Link to the Past was a song never really overstayed its welcome; but, in some of the other Zelda games, like Ocarina of Time, there are some songs that gave me some massive headaches as they looped and looped and looped… like that fucking flute playing obnoxiously at random points through the nightmarishly repetitive water temple song. Fucking teenage trauma right there! trauma Just thinking of that fucking song…


I might have to go to a psychiatrist

[Eric]

Link Between Worlds is totally a mainline Zelda though! Made in-house by Nintendo after Skyward Sword and before BotW! The one I'm iffy on is Triforce Heroes.