Once upon a time, in a vibrant meadow called Nintendo land, there lived a diligent and hardworking ant named Eiji Aonuma. Aonuma was known for his incredible dedication and love for the Zelda series. On the other side of the meadow, there was a carefree and energetic grasshopper named Junichi Masuda. Masuda was known for his work on the Pokemon series. He spent his days working on various music tracks for the games, enjoying the summer sunshine. As the warm summer days turned into breezy autumn, Aonuma noticed Masuda joyfully playing while the other devs were busy preparing for the next release season. Concerned for Game Freak's future, Aonuma approached him with a friendly smile. "Junichi, my friend, it’s release season soon," Eiji gently reminded Masuda. "It's important to put effort into your game so it’s fun, and play test it so there’s no bugs." Masuda paused for a moment, his eyes filled with curiosity. Oh, Eiji, my dear friend, why worry about fun and bugs when it will sell well anyways?” Aonuma understood Masuda's perspective but also knew the importance of polishing up games. "Junichi my friend, it is true that releasing many games for people to enjoy is important, but we must also only release games when they're ready." Masuda shrugged and continued being lazy, rushed, and cutting corners. Six years passed. Eiji Aonuma was happy to finally release the new Zelda game: Tears of the Kingdom. He was happy to learn that both the critics and mass gaming audience loved the game, and the games sold the fastest out of any Zelda game. Now, diligent ant Aonuma was curious what Masuda and the Game Freak people have done the past six years. He went over to where Masuda was at for the winter, to see how he’s doing. He was surprised to learn that the Pokemon Company has released more than 5 games in that same six years, and each one of them sold very well. Junichi Masuda and his pals were swimming in a pool made of money. So the moral of the story is kids: don’t put effort into your work! If you have a strong IP and brand recognition backing you up, you don't have to put in effort because the consumer will support you no matter what! The end. Wait. Hello fellow jerry cans. I’ve been playing the Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom lately (hit 80 hours as of writing this video), and I’m happy to report that I have been quite enjoying the game. I thought about doing a short review or first impressions video of the game, but as I sat down to write the script, I didn’t feel like doing a full video on Tears of the Kingdom. Why? Well a few reasons. Firstly, and this is the main reason, I feel like there’s just too much shit to do in the game that I haven’t completed yet, for me to talk about it for now. Perhaps I will do a full review of this game in the future. Second, well this might sound a bit unprofessional, but, Tears of the Kingdom is just so good, that I don’t want to make it my job by having to analyze it, capture footage, and edit a review video which I fear will take my enjoyment out of the game. Personally Breath of the Wild was one of my favorite games of all time, and this game expands everything I enjoyed about it. The game is that good, if you’re on the fence of buying it for some reason, this game get’s Gireum’s seal of approval, go buy it. For today, I wanted to focus on a different topic that I think will entice you more because it’s a topic that has been spreading in the Nintendo community discourse recently. And we need to talk about Tears of the Kingdom’s history. And no, I don’t mean the lore history in the game (which, side note, kinda bugs me because this game’s lore retcons out all the previous Zelda games and the timeline but that’s a whole nother topic), I mean this game’s development history. Pokemon has been the main topic of this channel for a long time, and I think it’s a good time to compare Pokemon and Zelda, because it’s a night and day difference on how these 2 franchises were handled with their new release the past 6 years. One going for quality, one going for quantity. "I am legion. For we are..." "A pain in my ass?" Let’s just take a look back at the past 6 years and note the key differences. The Past 6 Years Before I start, I guess I must make it clear for people who might not be familiar with the two franchises. While both Zelda and Pokemon are Nintendo franchises, mainline Legend of Zelda is developed by Nintendo themselves (aka Nintendo EPD) and mainline Pokemon is developed by Game Freak, a separate studio and Pokemon is published by Nintendo. Got that? Anyways. Breath of the Wild was released in March 2017 both on Switch and Wii U. Being developed for 5 years, Breath of the Wild itself was delayed several times. Being revealed in E3 2014 with a release date in 2015, I remember when they said they were confident that the game was gonna come out in 2015 and it’s almost laughable to see Aonuma and Miyamoto saying that now. I was in high school in 2014 when the “Wii U Zelda game” was announced and I got to play this thing in my first year of college. "Are you sure this will be released next year?" "Yes. All of our staff numbers are working together and doing their best." After the success of the first game, throughout 2017, Nintendo EPD and Eiji Aonuma got to work on the DLC first, with 2 DLC packs: The Master Trials and The Champion’s Ballad. After that was over, apparently the devs had too much idea for the DLC and decided to make a sequel instead, and they went into work right after. Tears of the Kingdom’s development history begins here, and it’s amazing that the sequel had a longer development time than the original game which got delayed several years. In June 2019, they first teased the game with a short animated trailer at E3. After that, for 2 years, Nintendo went into complete silence. I want to remind you that between 2019 and 2021, in those 2 agonizing years, many world events and gaming events happened during that time. In 2021, we finally got some actual gameplay footage with a 2022 release date, but not even a fucking title. In March 2022 they decided to delay the game, where Aonuma stated they needed more time to finish the game in a nicely produced video instead of those lazy Twitter non-apologies western game developers use as a trend these days. The next release was pushed back to 2023. They finally revealed the title in September 2022 with the first full trailer, and The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom was finally released worldwide on May 12, 2023. For six years the Zelda devs worked on Tears of the Kingdom, nothing else. Now let’s compare what the Pokemon teams were doing in the same time between 2017 and 2023. In 2017, Pokemon Ultra Sun and Ultra Moon was released on the 3DS. I want to remind everyone this quote unquote “third game” just came out a year after Pokemon Sun and Moon. But just a year later in 2018, Game Freak cranked out Pokemon Let’s Go Pikachu and Eevee, the gen 1 remake no-one asked for. Then the next year in 2019 they released Pokemon Sword and Shield, with a DLC the year right after. In 2021 Game Freak didn’t release a game but in early 2022 they released Legends Arceus, and in late 2022 they released Scarlet and Violet. In 2023 this year they plan to release the 2 DLC packs for Scarlet and Violet. "And then, there's another one..." "And another one!" Do you see what happened? Quality vs Quantity. Zelda developers worked on 1 game for 6 years, Pokemon developers worked on 4 games for 6 years. “Oh but Gireum, Zelda remakes came out between Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom!” Yeah, I know, that’s why I left out Pokemon Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl. I only counted MAINLINE games, not remakes that were made by separate companies. If we add those in, we can add Pokemon Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl into this clusterfuck which was developed by ILCA for Pokemon, and for Zelda, Link’s Awakening by Grezzo and Skyward Sword by Tantalus Media I’ll be damned. It’s still quality vs quantity by a mile! Stupid mindset of having a generation every 3 years so we can sell more goddamn plushies. I made this tweet a week ago with this infographic and it went viral, see how many likes it got and how many followers I have. A lot of Pokemon fans were angry about this, saying “where’s the Zelda remakes and Age of Calamity”. I guess many aren’t smart enough to read, cause I put the word “mainline” in there, and added in I only put Game Freak developed games in the thread. So here’s the full version, you donkeys. It’s still, quality vs quantity. The audacity of Pokemon fans to point out that Zelda had spinoffs too, you realize how much fucking spinoffs Pokemon has? There’s so many shitty games on mobile phones no one plays or only helpless people play or only Chinese people play. If it wasn’t for the Mystery Dungeon remake and Pokemon Snap, I would have said all Pokemon spin offs suck gacha balls. Isn't it just sad that between the time the first Tears of the Kingdom trailer came out in 2019 and the game's actual release, four mainline Pokemon games were released? I can’t believe it either, it’s just astounding how frequent these Pokemon game releases are. "Hey Joe, you wanna play a Pokemon game?" "No, I don't wanna fucking play another goddamn Pokemon game!" "Hey Joe, you wanna play a Pokemon game?" "Stop it..." What’s worse is that Game Freak is only made up of 169 people. I repeat, 169 people. For Zelda, Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom was developed by Nintendo EPD Production Group No. 3. I can’t find a source that tells me how many people are at Nintendo EPD No. 3, but in an interview about Breath of the Wild in 2017 Eiji Aonuma stated 300+ people have worked on the game, so the number is at least 300. In a span of 6 years, 169 people worked on 4 games and 2 DLC packs, 300 people worked on 1 game. It’s really when you start crunching up the numbers, it gets obvious why modern Pokemon games have been such a shitshow. Of course Pokemon will suck, Game Freak literally had half the less people working on the games and put out 4 times the games. This means objectively Tears of the Kingdom got approximately 8 times more the manpower in the same amount of time than Pokemon. That’s why I can’t really fault the developers like Junichi Masuda or Shigeru Ohmori or any one that’s at the creative side of Game Freak. This is really a planning issue from the higher ups and suits. I know often, many Pokemon fans (including me) make fun of Masuda and his minions, but Masuda or the hard working people of Game Freak isn’t really the problem here. All the past Pokemon games had good ideas and concepts, the direction was there, it’s just Game Freak was never allowed to complete their final vision. It’s whoever at the Pokemon Company or Nintendo or Creatures or Game Freak, I have no idea who it is, but someone or some people thought we need to make games annually! It’s a management issue. And this is the result. The Result Let’s just talk briefly about the final product of both side’s 6 years: the game themselves. The most amazing feature about Tears of the Kingdom is not the world or story, in my opinion, it’s the physics. The physics of this game is programming sorcery or something, because I don’t know how Nintendo was able to accomplish this in a game. I’m not a game developer, but actual game developers are flabbergasted by this game too. The fact that you can just attach anything to anything, and everything will control and behave exactly how you would think it would based on real world physics, I haven’t run into 1 single bug in this game that can’t be triggered intentionally, and it’s amazing they accomplished this considering how intricate the physics engine is. I think this is the result of 6 years of development, and Pokemon? Remember Pokemon Scarlet and Violet? That game was developed in a span of 3 years alongside Legends Arceus, so basically it got 1.5 years of development treatment from the developers. The result is constant stuttering, camera angle glitches happening almost all the time when you battle wild Pokemon, character movement physics is broken, move animations are laughably terrible. Oh and how can you forget them constantly delaying the launch of a simple cloud service to go with the game Still not out as of writing, what is this, rocket science? After playing Tears of the Kingdom for about 70 hours, I will say what makes this game special is not just the story or content or gameplay, but the detail. Detail is something that requires a lot of time to make. Tears of the Kingdom is just filled with detail, there’s so much goddamn stuff in the game. I find out new facts about the game or things you can do in the game from Twitter and YouTube every day, it’s crazy man. From the behavior of enemies during battles, to temperatures interacting with the environment, to random stuff like attaching a butter to your shield and it actually makes it a slide-able butter board, but what really caught my eye recently was NPC behavior. So in Tears of the Kingdom, every villager NPC actually has scripted actions based on the time. NPCs get up in the morning, they go to work or school, old people and young kids just stroll around, adults work in the field, they go back to their homes when it’s evening. Their lines are all scripted based on what situation they’re in. There’s even the detail of NPCs running to places with roofs when it begins to rain. This is what makes an open world game believable, it feels real and immersive. Pokemon on the other hand? Oh right, you have to choose between 2 options of disasters. Option 1: NPCs don’t move, just stay at 1 place in a village, and most of them couldn’t even be bothered to have idle animations and stand around like Gibdos I mean zombies. Shopkeepers stand still like they’re t-posing when they’re interacted with. Children just sit around cause it’s hard to animate that. Yes people, this is not a still image or a glitch or a mod, this is what modern Pokemon looks like. For god’s sake Game Freak, this is not a Gameboy game! Or option 2: NPCs move around but they flicker and lag like crazy, or they just glitch and disappear. Again, maybe if Game Freak had more people in their dev team and more time to make games this would have never happened, but they didn’t. One of the reasons I wanted to make this video was because of an interview with Eijij Aonuma by the Washington Post. In the interview about Tears, Aonuma stated that the game was already finished a year ago, but they spent a year polishing up the game so there weren’t any major bugs. This means that when they announced the delay in 2022 in the video where Aonuma had a really peculiar cute haircut, the devs were actually basically done with the game but they still chose to delay a year. Aonuma in the interview stated that he played the game from start to finish over 20 times over the year, and that’s some goddamn dedication. Some game series polish and debug a game for a year, some game series release a half-finished product per year. If that isn’t the biggest sign of quality vs quantity, I don’t know what is. Pokemon: Biting More They Can Chew You get the point, Zelda put time into their games and Pokemon didn’t. It’s obvious. But I’m not just here to complain and whine, I have more to say and this is not the end of the video. But first of all, I must address this question. Why do I keep comparing Pokemon to Zelda? I mean, other than the fact they’re both Nintendo franchises, they’re completely different genres of games. One is a puzzle solving action game series and one is a turn-based combat monster collecting game series. Well I wouldn’t be doing this if it wasn’t for that Pokemon feels like a kid trying to copy a smarter student's test in school, with the smarter student being Zelda. Pokemon is copying Zelda, at least in the few recent years. The last few years felt like Pokemon is trying to be a poor man's version of Zelda, maybe in an attempt to cash-in and follow a popular trend. I wouldn’t be saying this if it wasn’t for the fact that Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl is basically a butchered attempt at a chibi remake like Link’s Awakening. Legends Arceus copied the aesthetic and feel of Breath of the Wild, and Scarlet and Violet copied the open world aspect of Breath of the Wild Pokemon right now is a Zelda wannabe series, you cannot deny this, but at the same time, the management is not willing to put that much care into a game like Zelda. It’s like if a cheap burger franchise restaurant like McDonald’s suddenly wanted to serve premium five-star restaurant-esque burgers because they wanted to copy a success, but they still haven’t changed their rat-infested dirty kitchen and under-nourished employees. I’ll be honest, Pokemon even at its peak was never a major big budget masterpiece series of games. Unlike Zelda, Pokemon started out on handheld gaming consoles, not high-powered major consoles. When pixelated Pokemon Red and Blue came out on the Gameboy in the late 90s, Zelda was making one of the most influential 3D games of all time. In the 2000s when the Zelda series was releasing major big budget 3D games like Wind Waker and Twilight Princess, Pokemon was making relatively cheaper and simple 2D games like Pokemon Ruby and Sapphire, Diamond and Pearl, and so on. And because these 2D games didn’t take too long to make and required less manpower compared to modern Pokemon, releasing a game annually was a sustainable business model. Fast forward to the late 2010s. The problem is Nintendo’s current console is a handheld-home hybrid console. Pokemon was basically forced to evolve from making 40 dollars costing cheaper mid-range games on a 240p console to making 60 dollars costing full-price AAA games on a 1080p HD console. The manpower, care, and time required have ballooned, but not much has changed. The games are still being made on this annual mindset. Pokemon the game series is trying to bite more than it can chew, it’s collapsing under its own weight. We went from games that’s just a bit rushed to games that are barely complete to games that barely fucking works. I want to remind you that even the worst Nintendo first party games are bug-free and playtested as hell, but Pokemon’s standard of quality has gotten so low, that buggy launches are the norm now. What’s funny is that the Zelda series had Pokemon-like mid-range smaller budget games to go along too, at least in the past. And that was the handheld Zelda games. While the series was going from Wind Waker to Twilight Princess to Skyward Sword to Breath of the Wild on home consoles, on handheld consoles, they did make mid-range games like Minish Cap or Phantom Hourglass or underrated-game-I-recently-made-a-video-about-and-you-should-definitely-check-out called Spirit Tricks. Even on the hybrid console Switch, again, Nintendo outsourced to other companies to make remakes, and even got Koei Techmo to make a spinoff Warriors game to fill in the 6 years so the fans get some content during the gap between the 2 major Zelda releases. I think Pokemon needs to make the same decision. Here’s some suggestions on what they can do. A) Give at least 4 years for one mainline feature game to develop. "You're living in a dream world!" B) At the same time, don’t develop 2 games at once like they did with Legends and Scarlet and Violet. It’s a damn shame how those 2 games turned out to be, I think we could have gotten a good game if we combined the good parts of PLA and SV. C) Get other studios to make remakes or Legend Arceus-esque games, so Game Freak can put all their focus on the mainline games. Game Freak have been trying new stuff that’s a bit different from mainline Pokemon like the Let’s Go games and Legends, and I think they shouldn’t make those themselves anymore. Oh and I must emphasize because this is really really important. They should get competent studios, and make sure to give them plenty of time so it’s not a fuckup like BDSP again. I might strangle a cat if the Unova remake is another faithful garbage nostalgia-baiting cash grab. Conclusion Now I want to make it very VERY clear that despite my enjoyment, Tears of the Kingdom is not a perfect game. It has plenty of flaws. Biggest flaw I could probably name is that the story was a massive letdown, it’s just a repeat of the first game. Zelda gets “kidnapped” again by the big G, and you have to go to the 4 races town again to defeat 4 dungeons while at the same time gathering memories and clearing the shrines to save Princess Zelda. So fucking original, couldn’t we get a cliche-breaking new take on Zelda like Majora’s Mask was as Ocarina of Time’s sequel? However what matters is the execution. The game is still fun because it clearly received love, care, and attention from the developers, which my other favorite Nintendo franchise has been sorely missing in the past few years. For Pokemon, when’s the last time we got a full complete game? I would argue Pokemon Omega Ruby and Alpha Sapphire in 2014 is the last complete Pokemon game, it’s the last one with a full national dex with entries, and even then ORAS left out crucial Emerald Content like you-know-what. "Where the hell is it!" Since Tears of the Kingdom is selling like hot cakes at the moment, I hope this gives sign to not just Pokemon but other game companies, that it’s okay to delay games and polish it up, and not to crunch your fucking employees. I hope the suits at Pokemon Company learn a valuable lesson: do not let Game Freak be lazy, rushing, and cutting corners Follow the suggestions I listed earlier in the video by planning out games, releasing them less frequently, and getting other competent studios to make the spinoffs. …But oh yeah, I forgot. Why do they make annual frequent releases even at the cost of making shitty games? Well. Tears of the Kingdom is selling as much as Scarlet and Violet, and Scarlet and Violet is not alone in sales. Every single Switch Pokemon game is in the top 15 best selling Switch games list, and the business model of releasing half-baked games annually might be bad for the gamers but it still sells well, so of course they’ll keep doing it. I guess all my suggestions and hopes, they’re not gonna pass. I was living in a dream world!
