A (Mostly) Negative Tears of the Kingdom Review

hey all this is ratatosker and this is my mostly negative tears of the Kingdom review the review is mostly negative not because I have mostly negative opinions about tears of the Kingdom it's mostly negative because I mostly want to talk about only the negative things and the reason for that is because I'm sure you've already heard all the positive things I probably agree with all of the positive things it's likely that you already know tears of the kingdom is a great game and that it will probably win game of the year and I really don't feel like you need me to retread that well-explored territory so this is not a traditional review and if I didn't mention something in here you should just assume I have good feelings about it before I get to the meat of the negativity though I feel like I should buttress the inevitable complaints by talking about some of the things I liked I'll start with shrines shrines and tears of the kingdom are probably the biggest Improvement in breath of the wild shrines felt like an obligation after the 12th one I was already sick of them but I still did them I still felt compelled to do them because they were the only significant source of puzzles in the game and one of the few sources of permanent Rewards I dreaded finding them they were easy they were short they were unmemorable with only a few exceptions Interiors of the Kingdom though I love doing shrines every time I see a shrine on the horizon it immediately becomes my most important destination puzzles are far superior thanks to the new abilities views Ascend recall and Ultra hand the abilities make the puzzles more fun than they would be otherwise and a few even had me stuck for a bit it felt good to be stuck for a bit it felt good to sit there and have to think of a way to use my new powers in a way to get me through a shrine doing things the intended way is always the most fun for me but even doing things in a way that clearly wasn't intended has its appeal you get to feel very clever if you figure out an easier path than the one laid out for you the shrines aren't all very hard but because of the new abilities they're almost always interesting one of the things I liked about solving Shrine puzzles in the intended way was that they often served as tutorials they are supposed to show you and give you ideas about how you might use what you learn in the broader game if you hadn't figured it out already even better the shrines in a given environment show you things that will eventually be relevant in that environment or its Associated dungeon a shrine in the desert might have you use ultra hand to make sled vehicles that you can Traverse the sand it might have you use mirrors to reflect light which is something you'll have to do in the lightning dungeon I have found these shrines to be very helpful I didn't understand what the stabilizer zonai device did until a shrine guided me to the knowledge the best shrines are the ones that have you combine several different abilities at once it's not about the difficulty really a lot of shrines are easy but even the easy ones always seem to wake my brain up because they have multiple Solutions you have so many options that you cycle through them in your head and imagine how they might interact with a given puzzle people said similar things about shrines and breath of the wild but that was not true it was never true in breath of the wild there were some shrines that had a few non-standard ways to complete them but it wasn't anything like this in tears of the Kingdom most shrines have several solutions that are meaningfully different to the intended way and the game constantly invites you to try the non-standard the thing about the new abilities is that they're fun they're just fun to use they're fun independent of the context that they're in they enrich even the normal Gameplay at all times with their presence take climbing for example in breath of the wild climbing was the hot new thing you could climb anywhere and that reflected the game's emphasis on player freedom but in tears of the Kingdom climbing is old news who has time for such things climbing is a slow boring and outdated solution to a vertical problem a more fun and efficient solution is to find a place to ascend there is a surprising number of places where Ascend is usable if you're actively looking for them if no place is available then you can always build the way upward you can make a hot air balloon or use a spring device or fuse a rocket to your Shield your abilities guarantee that you always have an interesting way to interact with your environment they're just cool and they heighten the value of exploration for me it heightens the value of doing Sky Island puzzles or korok puzzles or Hudson sign puzzles exploration and puzzles become their own reward which is good because the actual rewards suck open world developers have a problem the problem is how do we reward players for exploring and interacting with such a large world they have to fill this broad area with things to do and rewards for doing those things in breath of the wild the rewards for completing shrines are progression towards a minor upgrade the rewards for finding koroks is progression towards a minor upgrade the reward for clearing an enemy encampment are weapons that the enemies drop that are probably worse than the ones you broke to clear them the reward for doing side quests was basically nothing if you were lucky you'd get rupees or gems that you could sell for rupees in tears of the Kingdom rewards are still terrible I bring koroks together and support Hudson signs not because I want the rewards but because I enjoy making vehicles and building structures the actual rewards are close to worthless in the case of Hudson signs it's actually worse than worthless because Addison has the bad habit of giving me a bunch of prepared food items that fill up my food inventory if you help him whenever possible you'll quickly have your food menu completely clogged with useless food items that you don't want that make it hard to find the ones you're looking for now the rewards that are actually items are a little better than they were in breath of the wild because of the fuse ability fuse adds another dimension to the utility of items when you open a chest and you get a shield for example it's not just a shield because in your mind you're translating it into what a shield could be you can attach a laser to it a flamethrower a rocket turn it into a skateboard when you find a ruby it's not just a ruby you can sell it for rupees but you can also turn it into a powerful explosive Arrow or you can discover that you can attach it to a shield to warm yourself in the colder climate similarly when you're fighting enemies you get their horns which means that while you may be sacrificing your current weapon you're also getting something that can be translated into a weapon in return one that might be stronger or more unique and it's not linked to a single moveset you can fuse it to any weapon style that you want plus when you're early in the game you don't really know what items are going to be useful when fused to a shield or an arrow or a weapon so the process of figuring that out is fun on its own figuring out that you can attach a ruby to a shield for added cold resistance is itself rewarding experimenting with these systems and discovering things really is a highlight of the game still eventually the novelty of this wears off and you realize that while rewards are definitely better than they were in breath of wild they're only moderately so my biggest complaint on rewards is how armor is so shamelessly reused for example let's look at some of the best content in the game the labyrinths to fully complete a labyrinth you have to go through the ground Maze and then you have to do the sky maze above it and then finally you descend into the underground Arena where you fight the boss it's actually great these challenges are lengthy they're fun they Prime you to expect an amazing reward comparable to the effort that you went through to get it but what do you get when you complete these areas you get the Phantom Ganon armor set that was DLC in the last game and oh it's not upgradable there's a lot of content that on its own is pretty interesting but that rewards you with the crappiest DLC gear you got in the last game and it's not just the DLC gear it's also rewards that you got from amiibos and that you can still get from amiibos armor in this game is supposed to be the highest quality reward available unlike weapons it's permanent it's upgradable it has bonuses for wearing each piece and unique perks for upgrading and wearing the full set armor should have been an easy win they could have made tons of new armor sets to use as rewards for the more meaningful content but no instead I learned to expect that if I come across any content that's interesting any content that's more meaty than a shrine the reward is going to be reused DLC or amiibo armor that references older games I understand that in tears of the Kingdom a lot of the pleasure of playing comes from the joy of Discovery the joy of exploration and I admit that tears of the Kingdom actually does a good job in that sphere like I said before with the shrines the abilities the discovery the experimentation they're great they're phenomenal it's fun to go through the shrines and the caves and the wells but not everyone is so strongly motivated by the simple joy of exploration and the actual in-game rewards for participating in all these things is very poor the primary incentive for doing caves is a bloopy crystal which is useful basically for getting one piece of armor from a shop armor that I suspect most people aren't going to even use because its effect makes you lose rupees instead of damage and as for Wells I don't even think I know what the primary reward is for clearing Wells does it have a primary reward is it Flint I cleared a lot of wells and now that I'm thinking about it I don't remember anything down there other than there being a lot of Flint all right let's talk about the dungeons the dungeons were a major sticking point before the game came out there was a huge number of classic Zelda fans that didn't like breath of the wild but made it clear that if this game had better dungeons then they would give it a try I spent a lot of time on my pre-release videos talking about it and the sense that I got from the community was that everybody was Pro dungeon even people that were full supporters of breath of the wild and didn't care at all about classic Zelda games were interested in the idea of more classically oriented dungeons it was always obvious that Nintendo wasn't going to go back to the strictly linear formula of their previous work but everybody seemed to agree that some elements of the classic dungeons could be brought into tears of the Kingdom to distinguish them from Divine beasts now what I said I wanted out of my dungeons was specifically that each have a unique visual aesthetic that reflects the environment that they're found in I basically wanted them to be unlike the Divine beasts they needed to have different atmospheres and they needed to have music that reflects and cultivates that atmosphere and that's all I wanted that's all I asked for I knew we weren't going to get classic dungeons in these strictest sense but I figured that if we at least got this it would be classic dungeon enough to make myself and other classic Zelda fans happy and what I asked for is exactly what I got it's word for word what I got the dungeons were visually distinct they did each have their own atmosphere they had really nice music to go with those dungeons that shifted and changed as you made progress they did culminate in a boss that was a reflection of the area that they're found in and that was very different from the other bosses in the game it is exactly what I asked for in many interviews now there's a lot of them at this point Nintendo has made it clear that they're not interested in class ExAlta games they're not gonna go back they don't like that style they think it's too restricting they're simply not interested in developing games of that type but it does seem that they understand that there is a longing for classic Zelda dungeons specifically and this appears to me to be an olive branch this is their way of making concessions it's their way of saying this is as close to Classic dungeons as we're willing to go in an interview before the game came out they compared the dungeons in tears of the Kingdom to the dungeons in what they call traditional Legend of Zelda games which I think shows there was a conscious effort by Nintendo to make these dungeons more in line with what they had in the past a conscious effort to make people like me happy so did it work am I happy no no I'm not which surprises me the most because I got everything I asked for let me start at the beginning these dungeons are clear improvements to the Divine beasts they're better in nearly every way and the lead up to the dungeon is often very impressive the lead up is a real compliment to the dungeon itself the Ascension towards the Rito dungeon where you fly from ruin to ruin ship to ship climbing higher and higher In This Storm to try and get to the top of the tornado with some of the most memorable stuff I've done in any Zelda game when you finally get to the very top and you go past the clouds pass to the storm where the skies are clear and the sun is shining and you see the clouds in the heart of the storm beneath you it was phenomenal I have never been so excited as when I was jumping into the mouth of the tornado and I could see the dungeon beneath me I think at that moment I thought to myself this is my favorite Zelda game this is the best Zelda game that's ever been made I don't think any other dungeon matched that for me but the lead up to all of them were all cool they were all very good and often they were a lot better than the dungeons proper the actual dungeon part of the dungeon is the worst part of the experience the journey to the dungeon is better the quests surrounding the area are better frankly for me the best content in the game is the content that surrounds the actual dungeon for example the spirit dungeon I'm not even sure if people want to count that as a dungeon it's so low quality I suspect a lot of people are just going to want to exclude it but despite that the actual stuff preceding the the dungeon proper is phenomenal I thought probably the best stuff in the game the quests leading to the Thunderhead Isles and then going through the Thunderhead Isles were so good things like that exemplify what tears the kingdom in breath of the wild type Zelda games do best what they're good at that is what they're good at dungeons is not what they're good at I appreciate the efforts that Nintendo went through to make the dungeons more like classic dungeons more diverse more visually appealing but these are not classic dungeons these are more like Divine beasts they're very much in the Divine BEAST's Style they're very short there's a bunch of switches you need to activate to clear the dungeon there are puzzles but if you exercise any degree of Freedom at all if you use anything other than what is very clearly the intended method the very often the puzzles don't exist there are no Puzzles you can circumvent the entire dungeon this is worse in the water temple because the water temple is just three blocks of land it's much much shorter than the route you took to get there playing tears of the kingdom and going through these dungeons has made me realize that what makes classic Zelda dungeons good is linearity it's not just about having a visually distinct style and an atmosphere that goes with that style and music that goes with that atmosphere no the real Secret Sauce is linearity it's restrictions it's chains I get that freedom is the theme of breath of the wild and tears of the Kingdom I enjoy that I appreciate that I see where they're coming from but does that have to be the case everywhere does it have to be in the dungeons this entire game is filled with freedom do I have to have freedom all the time player freedom is not an unmitigated good there are places where restrictions are necessary and beneficial for the player experience and Nintendo knows that because they enforce those kinds of restrictions in tears of the Kingdom all the time shrines for example don't give you access to unrestricted Freedom you can't use Auto build in there you can take out zonai devices that you got outside the shrine you can't climb the walls there are some that actively take things away from you take away your weapons and your armor to force you to make use of what you find inside the shrine these are the kinds of restrictions that dungeons would have benefited greatly from following tears of the Kingdom's release I had several podcasts on my Channel with other Zelda YouTubers people that are much larger and more established in the Zelda Community than I am and pretty much every person that I talk to agreed that the dungeons were among the weakest parts in tears of the kingdom and what they really could have used is linearity and what's funny one of my guests disagreed with that before the game came out we had had a previous podcast and he was like I don't want any linearity I don't want those kinds of restrictions that you're talking about I want the open-air style dungeons and after playing tears of the Kingdom he changed his mind he's like you know after seeing it I I get it I get it linearity would have been useful here and not all of them were classic Zelda fans necessarily one of those guests was a tears of the Kingdom breath of the wild speedrunner whose first Zelda game was breath of the Wild so this isn't a guy that's overcome with Nostalgia for classic Zelda dungeons this isn't a person that started in Ocarina 20 years ago and even this guest expressed disappointment in the Dungeons and a desire for added linearity it seems clear to me now that the appeal of classic Zelda dungeons is that they put challenges in front of you and iterate on those challenges across the dungeons they build on those challenges as you go through them and that's something you can't do in these open-air disjointed key dungeons you can't do things like that when you're suffocating on so much freedom a lot of people will say just get over it this is just how dungeons are going to be from now on but no I'm not sure that's true I don't think it's that helpless Nintendo certainly heard people's complaint about the Divine beasts they made concessions and they moved in this direction in a conscious effort to emulate classic dungeons I think that if I keep bitching about it for the next seven years Nintendo might finally realize that the people long for the chains of the classic Zelda dungeons they long for the freedom that can only be found in limitation let's talk about the sky islands and the depths when it comes to the sky islands I've heard most people have very few compliments and I've heard a lot of complaints but this is one where I actually disagree I deeply enjoyed the sky island activities primarily because as I mentioned before I really like using Ultra hand in Ascend and recall all the abilities and the sky islands have a lot of opportunities for me to do that they give me a lot of excuses to mess with those abilities especially when it comes to ultra hand building up there because usually they'll give you all of the stuff that you'll need to get from one Sky Island area to another it's rare that you have to pull out a zonai device yourself and I found myself almost never relying on my preset Auto build abilities because I enjoyed working within the limitations of what the sky islands were providing there always seemed to be an intended way to navigate from one Island to the other if you're not like me though and don't find inherent joy in trying to figure out the intended way to do all this stuff then you'll likely find The Sky Islands boring and unrewarding there are a couple of zonai areas up there that have cool rewards like the zonai armor and I think you get the wingsuit up there as well so those are always fun to find but apart from those not much up there for you and if you spend 30 minutes in any of these given Sky Islands that's pretty much how they're all going to go it's pretty much exactly how all the other Sky Island areas are going to be The Depths have a similar problem the size of the depth is impressive and I actually really enjoy exploring down there especially when you were trying to discover things for the yiga quest line I actually wish that for that questline they didn't give you a marker that shows you exactly where you need to go it would have been enough if the NPC had given you a general direction and then have you follow those statues without having to know exactly where it is still that was a high for the depths and it was also fun when you had to find the korok forest and heal the great Deku Tree those were great I wish there had been more important stuff to do down there because without clear direction if you're just wandering around in the depths and mapping things out for no specific reason then the novelty wears off rather quickly and you realize that every place here is exactly the same as every other place the story of Tears of the kingdom is also something I have mixed feelings about it's far better than breath of the Wild and it has some really excellent high points but it's still fairly weak and I think it's probably towards the bottom of all the 3D Zelda games sometimes when I offer criticisms of Zelda's stories I will get back reactions that say something like was all the games I've never had very good stories and I think that's ridiculous I think Zelda games have had fantastic stories the stories are admittedly simple but the fact that they're simple doesn't mean they're not good stories Zelda's stories are meaningful despite their simplicity and there's lots of examples of things like this for example children's books there are a lot of children's books that are mostly pictures with only a few sentences per page and yet they manage to be far better stories than many books that are complex and are hundreds of pages long I think Zelda games are like that they managed to have surprising depth despite the fact that they're simple and they're targeted towards children now to understand why I think tears of the Kingdom's story is bad we should probably talk about why breath of the wild story is bad because I think they're both victims to the same problem in breath of the wild the story isn't told to you over the course of the game rather what happens is you do the great plateau and then King Rome gives you an exposition dump that tells you the entire story all at once he tells you about Calamity Ganon he tells you about the efforts they went through to prepare for his coming he tells you about the Guardians and the Divine beasts and how Calamity getting took them over when he was resurrected he tells you about how the Champions were killed how you were Gravely wounded and how Zelda is still at the castle holding Calamity again in at Bay and has been for 100 years waiting for you to wake up and that is the entire plot that is all of the relevant information that you need to have to go complete the game everything else you do that's Story related doesn't provide you with new goals it doesn't have anything to do with what you're currently doing what you're currently doing you've already been told go do the Divine beasts or just go and take out Calamity Ganon The Story related content only fleshes out a few details about that backstory that you've already been told it's not something that's happening in the present you're just piecing together what happened in the distant past which is significantly less important to you because regardless of what did happen in the past you know what things are like now in the present in the present there are no sad or somber moments the only ones that exist you can only see through the memory cutscenes all of the emotional highs and lows have already happened the story told in the memory cut scenes was interesting but while I was looking at them I often wish that it was something that was happening to me something I could actually play through with stakes and not something I was just looking at the things that you learn through memory cutscenes in breath of the wild don't affect anything in the present world the information doesn't impact your goals and it doesn't recontextualize your understanding of events the reason the story is so front loaded is because Nintendo wanted you to have the freedom to go and do anything you need to be able to go to any region any Town find any boss and therefore you need to have all the relevant context immediately it's understandable why they did it this way but one of the complaints people had about breath of the wild especially classic Zelda fans was that they wanted a more traditionally told story giving you all the information up front and putting all of the emotional highs and lows behind memory cutscenes is not a good way to keep people engaged in the story for the hundreds of hours the game can last now tears of the Kingdom understood this and so they tried to do both at once they still wanted to keep their freedom they still wanted to keep their emphasis on you can do anything and go anywhere but they also wanted to fix the problem with their story and so what they did first is they didn't give you all the information up front in fact in the beginning you have very little to work with your only real goal is find Princess Zelda you don't know where Zelda is you don't know where Ganondorf is you don't even know who Ganondorf is you don't know about the demon war or the secret stones or the Sages unlike in breath of the wild this is all information you're expected to glean through progression and I think that's good that's a step in the right direction going through a dungeon or seeing a memory cutscene actually does give you important information that changes or gives you new goals or recontextualizes existing goals this approach to try and give people player freedom and also simulate linearity is pretty good and it can have some high payoffs for example the moment I found the master sword memory cutscene at that point I had done two dungeons and had seen a few other memory cutscenes but this was the one that reveals that Zelda had turned into a dragon and it was a plot twist I was not expecting it shows her receiving the master sword and her plan to heal the sword over time by becoming a dragon at the end repeating the words that we heard at the very beginning link you have to find me and now you understand the meaning of those words you have to find her because she's going to be a dragon she won't be able to find you because she won't be herself and then when you leave the cutscene directly above you you can see the dragon there she is watching over you as she has been all this time when that happened I desperately constructed his own eye device to try and get up to her wasting as many Zodi charges as I needed to and as I'm going towards her I'm thinking about all the times I've seen the dragon like at the very beginning of the game it was flying around the sky islands as I was traversing them almost as if she was waiting for link to wake up it's a real emotional moment a real highlight of the game it changes the nature of your goals and it changes the contexts of what you're doing in the present this moment was so good I would put it up there with any other Zelda games emotional Peaks it's just that impactful now it's not all good there are problems with trying to do both things at once focusing both on player freedom and trying to simulate linearity the biggest example is the awful cutscene that we have to watch after every dungeon tears of the Kingdom wants you to go off and clear any dungeon in any order but they also want you to have the information that you get at the end of the dungeon regardless of which dungeon you do first and so their solution to that problem is to just put the same cutscene after clearing every dungeon this is an awful decision I don't understand why they did this exactly if they found it so important to make sure you know about this information found in this cutscene after the first dungeon then they could have just scripted it so that the subsequent dungeons gave you different information each Sage could have talked about a different thing they could have taken some of the stuff that you find in the hieroglyph memory cutscenes and repurpose them into subsequent dungeons after the first one and then replace those memory cutscenes with other different memory cutscenes it's not like there was a lack of interesting things they could have elaborated on about the distant past like for example they could have made a memory cutscene better showing ganondorf's relationship with the Gerudo what was he like as a king better explained his motivations because honestly those are poorly explained in the game they're barely touched on explain why there's a Gerudo Sage implying that there's at least some of them that don't agree with what ganondorf's doing in fact that's what the grudo stage could have actually talked about I think that would have been a more graceful solution the ending of a dungeon is supposed to be an accomplishment you just cleared the dungeon you beat the boss you should be rewarded with information that you don't have yet that is narratively interesting and instead what we get is another person telling us about demon Kings and secret stones another limitation on this insistence of having both freedom and linearity is that it makes link look bad ostensibly your goal is to search for Princess Zelda that's the justification for many of the side quests that's one of the primary motivations for going to the different regions and helping them with their problems but it's possible to have link know exactly where Zelda is and what happened to her before you do any of that even before you know that she's a dragon you could already have gotten memory cutscenes before and have realized that she's in the past but regardless of whether you got some of the memory cutscenes or all of the memory cutscenes the game doesn't take that information into account and Link doesn't share this information with any of the other people he goes along with them and pretends like it's all still a mystery where could she be I better go into the Zora area and look for her and like it seems the people are putting huge amounts of resources and effort into finding Zelda each time you help out a region more and more people from those Villages come to look out landing and help out in the efforts to locate Zelda so there's this huge effort with like Rito flying in the air and gorons and people looking for Zelda all over the place even people from the newspaper and the side quests are all hey I heard that Zelda's over here they're still trying to find her they're still keeping an eye out and Link just lets them he doesn't say anything even though he's seen all the memory cutscene and has the master sword on his bag it's just weird but really all of that are those are just nitpicks those are the consequences of trying a different way of Storytelling it's a consequence of them trying to address the complaints people had about breath of the Wild my real problem about the story is it's complete unwillingness to depict loss or sacrifice I don't like the ending I don't like that Zelda just stops being a dragon doesn't remember being a dragon isn't traumatized by those events and doesn't pay any cost in any way I'm not saying that I wanted her to stay a dragon and I'm not saying that I wanted the game to have a tragic ending no what I am is annoyed that Nintendo wanted to have it both ways they understood the importance of sacrifice to a story and so they created a situation in which Zelda sacrifices herself for the sake of a distant future they set up the rules to that situation they're the ones that wrote that she would be permanently changed they spent time to make it clear that this was not reversible and they did that to give her sacrifice impact so that when you got to the part of the story that reveals that Zelda is the light dragon you are emotionally affected by the events that transpired the context shift in what's been going on hits an emotional Peak and for that emotional Peak to occur and be effective the sacrifice needs to be important and then at the end they break their own rules raru and Sonia's ghost change her bag with no explanation of how they're able to do that no explanation of why raru and Sonia's ghosts are even still around especially after you've seen raru's ghost disappear after the beginning Sky Island they broke their own rules for no other purpose than to have a nice ending and that's very annoying and look I'm not opposed to Zelda having a nice ending not at all in fact I think the actual ending if I don't think about the fact that they're taking away the previous sacrifice is pretty great the final battle with Ganondorf after he consumes the secret Stone and becomes a dragon himself and then Zelda's Dragon form coming to help you that whole fight scene was incredible and when she reverts back to human form and you go and Skydive to catch her finally grabbing her arm which contrasted in the beginning when you tried to grab her but failed and she fell into the darkness but this time you succeed you grab her and happy ending I thought that was great I thought that was a magical way of doing things but I hate what they had to do to bring this scene about they established the rules of how the dragons work so you understand the importance of the sacrifice Zelda is making to get you emotional at that moment when you find out that Zola was their all along and then they break their own rules with no explanation just because they want to so that you can have this scene where link grabs her arm and they have a happy ending and you get emotional because it parallels that scene in the beginning when he failed to grab her they wanted to have their cake and eat it too and in my opinion that trying to do everything reduces the quality of both of those important scenes and it's it's missing something many of the previous Zelda games have been very good at depicting loss at conveying a sense of loss that's hard to describe in Ocarina of Time when you leave the forest you have this scene with your childhood friend Surya you're beginning your adventure you're about to go into Hyrule Fields you're about to go and see the broader world that you've never seen before but this scene focuses on what you're leaving behind and there's this sense that something important is being lost something you won't be able to get back once you cross that threshold it's a strangely Melancholy scene [Music] [Music] dude now the endings to Zelda games are typically good endings or happy endings but they're usually not completely happy something is lost in this victory in Ocarina of Time you beat Ganondorf you seal him away but then Zelda sends you back the past so that you can live out the childhood you lost and so here you lose Zelda you lost the world that you just saved in Twilight Princess midna returns to the Twilight realm and shatters the mirror behind her forever severing the connection between your worlds you completely lose mitna in Skyward Sword impa stays in the past to protect Zelda's body promising them that they'd meet again and then Link and Zelda go back to the future and they do meet again except that impa's a shriveled old woman and then she dies immediately after you also lose Phi who has been your companion throughout this whole game as she stays behind inside the master sword at the end of Wind Waker you find out that the king parallels Ganondorf both obsessed with the past both obsessed and bound by the Hyrule that used to be the king Ganondorf and all of old Hyrule are buried beneath the waves and he entrusts Lincoln Zelda with the hope for the future all of these are happy hopeful endings but they're permeated with laws they're permeated with a sense of loss which makes them more meaningful tears of the kingdom does not it is all happy all the time there's no sacrifices on any level and do not even bring up Sonia and raru to me they don't give off any sense of loss because you've lost them already Sonia died tens of thousands of years ago and her ghost was never seen again until the very end and raru raru has died twice already he dies when he seals Ganondorf away and his ghost appears in the sky tutorial to help link out and guide him and then after you clear that tutorial his ghost dissipates and says goodbye what is he even still doing here you can't give off that sense of loss that I'm talking about by killing off the same character three times no there's no loss here my final thoughts on tears of the kingdom are actually the exact same as the thoughts that I had after breath of the Wild I think this is a great game it will probably win game of the year I love the open world I love it it's great I like how the game plays I like the physics engine I love what they did with the ultra hand I've got like 225 hours on this game and inevitably when the DLC comes out that includes Master mode and whatever else they have I'm going to start over and play through it again this is a masterpiece but I insist that there is no reason why they can't emulate their past Zelda games when it comes to the Dungeons and when it comes to the story and I hope that they come to that conclusion for their next game anyway that's the end of this video please unsubscribe and unclick the bell notification please leave me some comments that I should go back to playing the classic Zelda games if I love them so much and if you're not feeling alienated enough to do that then that's kind of surprising but I'm sure I'll get to you in a future video until then thank you very much for watching

Channel: Ratatoskr

Views: 252,996

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Id: Vxy_Wi7bIcQ

Length: 38min 55sec (2335 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 11 2023