Tears of the Kingdom Critique - A Legendary Disappointment

I have never been more upset and disappointed in a video game than I am with tears of the Kingdom this isn't a terrible game but it is far from good and it's way below the bar of quality set by past Zelda titles hello I'm feeble King and welcome to my YouTube channel where I'm not afraid to disagree with every mainstream game critic and do not care if this video gets Mass down voted because Zelda is my favorite game franchise and it deserves better than this there is so much wrong with this game that I don't even know where to start so I guess we should rewind time and talk about the problems with its predecessor breath of the wild and how tears of the Kingdom fixes none of them breath of the wild redefined what a 3D Zelda game could be the majority of this game's long development was spent on Crafting its vast open world which meant that not much time was able to be spent on filling the world with quality content this resulted in a game with only four short easy Zelda dungeons lacklust Shrine puzzles a boring story terrible boss battles broken combat and awful enemy variety and despite all that I still loved breath of the Wild for the first 35 hours or so until the lack of enemy variety started to get way too boring this was because the Majesty of exploring the open world was so amazing that I enjoyed the game in spite of its content not because of it at this point I thought it was obvious what Nintendo should do to make a superior sequel to breath of the wild they needed to create a game that combined the quality content of pastel the titles with the open world the breath of the wild this potential sequel could have a new map about half the size of its predecessor with reuse assets so that Nintendo could save development time for fine-tuning the combat system increasing enemy variety and crafting long-form dungeons with good puzzles and bosses it it would also be amazing if some of these longer dungeons were optional and hidden within the world similar to how Elden ring hid its optional Legacy dungeons as rewards for exploration the game I just described would be an obvious Masterpiece and satisfy both traditional Zelda fans as well as those who love breath of the wild so what did we get instead breath of the wild again but you can build cars and instead of four tiny dungeons there's five my disappointment is immeasurable and my day is ruined this video will have spoilers if you only care about major end-of-story plot spoilers I'll give you a second spoiler warning towards the end of the video so let us begin this critique by talking about one of tier's main selling points The Depths if I say that it's lazy for Nintendo to reuse the same map from breath of the wild some may counter this claim by saying that there's a whole new map the SCI of the previous game underneath how could this game not be worth 70 dollars my response is that it's not the size that matters but how you use it while the depth looks cool at first you quickly realize that this dark place is actually just one biome stretched across the entire map I'll admit the mushroom Forest Vibe does look cool at first but it starts to wear out its welcome after many hours of Exploration imagine if Hyrule was just one forest biome with no Snowy Mountains no desert No Death Mountain so on and so forth you get the point it would be boring when it comes to Quality content The Depths is also lacking it contains zero shrines zero puzzles of any kind not connected to the main story dungeons some rare armor sets a single yiga storyline with some easy vehicle bosses and that's it by contrast Hyrule contains many side quests Villages biomes and puzzle shrines The Depths isn't a selling point it's a half-baked distraction but I did intentionally forego mentioning one thing that the depths contains a lot of because it leads me perfectly to my next Point enemy variety or the lack thereof I was moderately entertained by the combat of breath of the wild until I realized that 90 plus percent of all enemies in the map were just the same vocabulins moblins and lizard men copy and pasted across the entire world well if you were already bored by the lack of enemy Variety in breath of the wild you just love the depths because 90 plus percent of all the enemies are just Bo coblins moblins and lizard men copy and pasted once again so most of what you're doing in the deaths is fighting the same enemies you've already thought in the last game again 10 out of 10 IGN the rest of the game doesn't fare much better in terms of enemy variety but you might be thinking feeble there are new enemies sure they aren't in the depths but what about them well let's talk about them there are like likes where you need to wait and shoot them with an arrow or a blends who crawl around ceilings you need to shoot them in the face with arrows to knock them down for an easy kill and there's these giant bat creatures that pick up enemies and are also killed in one hit by an arrow these hand monsters are kind of fun and scary but all you really need to do is climb up on a surface and then shoot them with arrows oh and they also brought back the gibdo from Ocarina of Time I Loved These enemies scary Health sponges that would eat Link's face off if you didn't unload a crap ton of damage before the creepy slow motion attack began oh what's that they're immune to physical attacks in tears and you just use reju's lightning abilities that you cast by shooting an arrow why disappointment doesn't even begin to State how I feel about these enemies this is so lazy every solution to beat almost every new enemy is the same combat and tears is at its most fun when you are learning the melee attack patterns of enemies to memorize openings and flurry Rush timings and none of these new enemies engage with the core combat system so they're underwhelming the one exception to this is the Hora blend who has some basic melee attacks but I rarely saw them because they returned to the ceiling too quickly after being shot down there are also these simple robot Guardian enemies you find in the tutorial but they just feel like slightly more simple bokoblins very rarely they have a flamethrower which is kind of cool I guess the only other mechanically interesting normal enemies that can be fun in melee combat are just the same three enemy types you already fought in breath of the wild the only exception to this is the boss vocabulin which is the only New Normal enemy they added that I actually enjoy fighting when looking at mini bosses it isn't much better the depths introduces one new mini boss in the form of this whale thing which is kind of like a stone Palace and a he knocks combined into one so it feels a bit too familiar and not all that interesting to fight the sky world introduces the flux construct that gets copy and pasted around everywhere and the Overworld has the gliac copy and pasted everywhere which is actually a fun fight once you're strong enough to reasonably kill one there's apparently 34 lionels hidden around Hyrule in the depths but I somehow only found a single Lionel during my 80 plus hours of play time this was very disappointing since I enjoyed this mini boss in breath of the wild and I just kept finding flux constructs everywhere there's also a rare chance encounter with the Gloom hands that will spawn a phantom Ganon upon defeat which is a reused mini boss from the main story this is the type of new enemy I wish we saw more of in Monster camps he has a unique melee move set with fun to learn openings and flurry Rush timings for the vast majority of the game you will be fighting flux constructs and the same he knockses and Stone taluses from the last game but this time the stone Talus has three bokoblins on his back tears of the Kingdom really makes you feel like you're fighting the same boss over and over again 10 out of 10 IGN tears of the Kingdom has such poor enemy variety that if breath of the wild had this many enemies I would complain that there aren't enough fun enemies to fight and this game reuses the older Games map close your eyes and imagine if eldering just had a bunch of Hollows Knights and bosses copy and pasted from the beginning of Dark Souls 3 spread across its entire map with three new Mini bosses and that was it no more enemy variety than that it would be an awful 4 out of 10 game so why do we give Zelda a pass some may say that Zelda is less about combat and more about puzzles so it shouldn't matter but if that that's true then they shouldn't make an entire new map in the depths where the only thing you can do is fight re-skinned enemies if the Zelda team is going to make a combat focused game that is obviously combat focused it needs to have better enemy variety and better Combat on that topic let's talk about the combat it's still broken flurry Rush is a mechanic that allows link to slow down time if he Dodges an attack at the last second which rewards him with free hits I dislike this mechanic as it makes combat too easy but if the Zelda team insists on its inclusion they need to make it actually work sometimes you dodge way before an attack goes through and you get it and sometimes you dodge after an attack goes through and you get it in this example the moblin isn't even close to me and hasn't let out his attack and I get flurry rush in another example this bokoblin fully finishes his two attack combo I dodge after he is done swinging and I get flurry Rush and this second example occurs so often that I was able to incorporate this broken flurry Rush trigger on every bakoblin second attack with such consistency that it became a part of my combat strategy to break the combat system even worse than this I am not rewarded with flurry Rush when I should get it just as often if not more so than in breath of the wild since it's been six years and the Zelda team still couldn't fix this fundamental flaw on their combat system I doubt they will ever be able to they should just drop the concept entirely since they can't pull it off another issue with combat is how healing works you can heal infinitely in the pause menu I hate this because it takes away all tension from Battle since I have to literally do a challenge run to be killable if you think I'm being hypocritical because I do level 1 runs in Dark Souls that is such an absurdly stupid point to bring up because I am able to die in a normal run of dark Souls it's acceptable when I create an extra hard mode through a challenge run to replay a game but the game designers should obviously offer me a fun normal mode for my first playthrough so I was editing the video and I realized that challenge in combat is a more complex topic than I gave it credit for in this section of the critique after all I could kill bokoblins with just arrows from far away if I'd like so what's stopping me from using my inventory to break the entire combat system I think the core issue is that I don't consciously have to do a challenge run to engage in melee combat it's very natural to mix melee and ranged combat when fighting and I have to go out of my way to only use ranged combat and sit on a Ledge and just kill enemies with arrows this isn't true with unlimited healing it's natural to engage with the healing mechanic and that mechanic is fundamentally broken I have to go out of my way with the challenge run to not have near unlimited healing while I have to go out of my way to choose a monster camp with arrows or other items this leads to me only ever resetting a save if I lose too many heart it's on a weak encounter and if I'm engaged with a strong encounter like a boss battle I can more easily justify spending resources on it making me unkillable I am and will always be vehemently against infinite healing in the pause menu as it drains all difficult Encounters of any real tension the solution to this is obvious either add a hunger meter so link can't eat and drink potions infinitely or have a set amount of potions and meals that link has access to in his pouch during combat and he can only put more meals into his pouch if he escapes combat the second solution is somewhat similar to what every other Zelda game does with collecting bottles for potions but they gave up on trying to balance combat once they went open world there could also be an animation that plays where link is vulnerable to damage while eating to add a risk reward mechanic to Healing on the topic of combat balance let's talk about Gloom this is a mechanic that permanent gently removes Hearts from link that cannot be healed until he returns to the surface or reaches a light root you can cook dishes that undo this effect so preparation can still lead to combat lacking tension or more realistically this will cause you to avoid fighting the reskinned enemies in the depths as much as possible except for when you want to mine some zonite since that can Auto build Vehicles tears of the Kingdom brings back the weapon durability system from breath of the wild where weapons break constantly this system is fun in the early game when the weapons you're breaking are all useless but it is bad in the late game as it leads to players stockpiling weapons and never using their best gear in anticipation of a fight that may never come tears saw this issue and said what if we make all the weapons break all of the time in tears every weapon on the surface has become rusted as a result of the upheaval and you mainly make weapons Stronger by fusing them with strong monster Parts but even a strong weapon is still rusted and can break quickly this kind of fixes the issue of me stockpiling weapons if only because my weapons break so often that I constantly have to dip into the pile my main issue with this system is that I can never feel good when I create a strong weapon since I'm fully aware it will break after just a little use there's a convoluted way of restoring weapon durability with an octo Rock but weapons break so quickly that this hardly matters a large part of my enjoyment in a loot-based game comes from the feeling I get when I stumble across an amazing weapon and I can't get this feeling while playing tears because all the weapons break too quickly the best loot you can find that doesn't break is armor and while some of the set bonuses are cool all armor can become overpowered if you upgrade it enough so finding new armor doesn't feel very rewarding either although I somewhat dislike how weapons break so easily into the late game a common defense of the this mechanic is that it forces you to experiment with new weapons throughout the entire game unfortunately this can't be true because there's only three actually different weapon move sets a spear has the same animation set as Albert and a great sword has the same animation set as a club and a giant Boomerang Hammers and boomerangs have vertical strikes while swords have horizontal strikes but they both have the same attack timings and Spin Attack when charged so mechanically they're identical if you include breath of the wild this combat system was in development for 11 years and they couldn't be bothered to make a fourth real weapon move set again imagine if this was Elden ring and there were only three and a half weapon move sets that just I I don't know what to say I I don't know what to say just imagine if this was Elden ring it would not be acceptable so why is it acceptable here another issue I have with this game is that they still don't let you rebind the jump and run buttons you can switch them but not actually change them in a meaningful way if I want to do a running jump I have to awkwardly hold the bottom button while pressing the top button without hitting the two side buttons El knew that the bottom three buttons of abxy were the most important so they binded the least important action to perform in combat or exploration interact to the top button tears doesn't even give you the option to change their awful control scheme even though plenty of people complained about this issue in breath of the wild and did I mention that this game was in development for six years but they did decide to add one new thing to combat after all these years summons and they're very annoying I prefer exploring Hyrule alone because it's more atmospheric and every time you climb a surface the summons will play a visually distracting animation of returning to the ring and leaving it so I'll deactivate summons but I also want toolin's ability to get extra distance while gliding this led to me constantly deactivating and reactivating summons while playing which was made even worse since there is no quick select way to activate summons and you have to constantly go into the pause menu I'm aware I'm nitpicking here but I decided to complain anyways because I really don't want to see summons come back in Futures all the titles I either want a single companion who stays off screen except for dialogue and cutscenes or nothing at all to conclude this section of the critique on combat I'll say this I've heard many players say it doesn't matter that Nintendo reused the previous Games map because traversing it feels so different than before and they are somewhat correct the layout of monster cams have changed and there's a way more combat encounters than before however just because a game world is tightly packed with things to do that doesn't mean those things are actually new most of what you're doing in this game is traversing to the same landmarks as before while killing most of the same enemies as before it's lazy to put it another way they made Hyrule extremely dense with things to do without making those things unique or worthwhile tears of the kingdom is the very definition of quantity over quality if the Zelda team wants to make a combat focused game this isn't good enough some people who disagree with me and love the combat and tears will say that they enjoy how many options are available to them during any combat encounter due to the fusion mechanic my issue is that even if you like these options a lot you are using a bunch of tools to overcome the same easy problem which is killing reskinned enemies over and over again tears of the Kingdom forces players to create their own fun rather than provide a fun experience in the first place so combat is still broken enemy variety is still awful The Depths is lacking depth but there's one new area I've yet to cover and I've saved the worst new content for last the sky world this is by far the biggest disappointment in the entire game outside of the main story dungeons there isn't a single fun thing in any of the sky islands almost every Shrine found here follows the same formula find a light Crystal that is sometimes attached to a re-skinned flux construct boss build the vehicle you obviously need to build to reach the other side which is usually a plane or a hover pad thingy and ride the Crystal from point A to point B after this you are rewarded with two long load screens and a shrine without any puzzles 10 out of 10 IGN I guess there are interesting looking things in the sky sort of but even those are disappointing there are towers that look cool but just end up being a short diving through laser section and a little Shrine those jumble of blocks that lead to a sky island look cool but they're just a diving through Rings minigame followed up by a treasure chest Shrine those Sky mazes look cool but you have to read do the maze on the ground from breath of the wild to access them which is boring then slowly fly over to the sky maze so that you can trial and error your way through a maze while gliding and what is your reward for that another flux construct but this time you fight him in the dark spooky I don't I can't even like say the jokes for this seriously I just I'm so disappointed I'm just so disappointed like I don't this isn't a part of the script it's just it's so bad I only did two out of the three mazes maybe the third one's more interesting I don't think it is the the two I did were like identical they sucked I cannot believe that I wrote this but it's true I enjoyed exploring the sky world more in Skyward Sword than in tears of the kingdom and that one was also bad at least riding the bird was fun and it didn't take a week to reach the mini games I want everyone watching this video to go with me on a thought experiment if you've played Elden ring and you think about the most most amazing memorable moments of Discovery felt while exploring that game world was there a single moment in tears that came even close to that the depths didn't feel cool to discover because it's just lying right out in the open for everyone to see and it's clearly marked on your map Eldon ring also has an underground map but instead of just having a giant hole near the start of the game they hid it away in an unsuspecting Forest elevator although there is later a giant hole form that leads to the underground but even that was done better in Elden ring since you have to go out of your way to re-explore the beginning of the game after defeating a mid-game boss to find it making it still feel like your Discovery when you explore something seemingly mundane only for your curiosity to be rewarded Beyond Your Wildest Dreams it creates a feeling of Amazement like no other that feeling is exactly why eldendring is a masterpiece and that feeling is nowhere to be found in tears of the Kingdom even if you disagree and enjoyed some of your discoveries how amazing were they and how often I guarantee you that however good you think tears is at exploration Elden ring is many many times better when I was exploring the sky islands I expected to find a unique biome a town a unique mini boss or at the very very least a single optional long-form dungeon and all my hopes and dreams were shattered the only thing to be found in the sky islands was disappointment but feeble I hear you say I like the sky islands because it's fun to fly the different Vehicles well that means it's time to talk about the hook for this Zelda game which is that you can build Vehicles this brings me back to something I discussed in my God of War critique the non-puzzle if a puzzle is presented to a player where they immediately know the solution because the puzzle is either brain dead simple people are just being repeated that it involves no thought and is a non-puzzle or a Time waster that's exactly what the vehicle mechanic is a waste of time if I get a light Crystal see I need to bring it to a location and know that the plane can fulfill that need then the puzzles solved immediately there is no thought or complexity furthermore there is no mechanical difficulty driving the cars and flying the planes is easy hold the stick forward to get to the location there is no mechanical enjoyment there is no problem solving enjoyment there is no nothing I guess the visuals are kind of cool when you're flying though there's there's a silver lining before you unlock the auto build mechanic creating the vehicle to slow in TDS which only adds to the boredom there is genuinely nothing of value to do in the sky outside of the main story temples and I cannot be more disappointed another issue that prevents me from building a lot of vehicles is that they use resources to build and when you low to save where you had a vehicle it will always disappear I understand needing to reset vehicle parts in the level but even an auto build vehicle made from zonite will disappear if you save and load I just disagree with this decision before moving on I will say one more thing about the fusion mechanic if you enjoy building wacky vehicles with Fusion that is fine I don't really care about games that give the player Ultimate Freedom with no real Direction on what to do with said freedom I care about games that give restrictions to the player so they need to use their brain to overcome obstacles this is something the Zelda series usually does very well but the vehicle mechanic does poorly even if you disagree and love the sandbox Freedom granted to you by the fusion mechanic does that really make up for all the game's glaring flaws and is the fusion mechanic as fun to you as exploring Hyrule was on your first playthrough of breath of the wild if the developers added a mode with ultimate freedom to create levels like in Mario maker that you could upload online then I might start to enjoy this approach even if I still would like it less than a real Zelda game but as is the only joy that comes from car building is the satisfaction of building something visually wacky and the ability to build something that is slightly better or more efficient at reaching a specific destination other than this I will say that it was sort of fun to ride a car through Hyrule the first time but driving a car through an Overworld I've already explored got boring after about an hour or so this critique has been very negative because I'm really upset about this game so let's talk about something the game does well the world feels a lot more alive than before with many new faces in Hyrule sometimes I question where all these people came from because there certainly weren't this many people in breath of the wild tyrule that takes place a little bit before this game but who cares it's kind of cool even the most unsuspecting of NPCs will usually have some sort of personality to offer and I enjoy how Lookout Landing serves as the game's Hub world where you can see NPCs come and go the improved NPC dialogue makes this game feel a little bit more like it takes place in an actual Zelda World unfortunately the side quests that these NPCs offer the player are a mixed bag they're a definite improvement over breath of the wild which had the most consistently mundane side quests in the Zelda series but still not amazing like the last game there's a lot of boring collect X to get y-type quests even if the dialogue surrounding these quests is moderately more interesting than before there were some side quests like the hateno mayoral campaign that was kind of fun and while I certainly haven't completed every side quest I will say I haven't seen any of them that go beyond being just kinda good I certainly never encountered a side quest that was as memorable as some of the ones in Skyward Sword or Majora's Mask on the topic of side objectives let's talk about caves tears added tons of cave and Wells across the entire map but they aren't very good every cave is almost completely identical where all you do is fight horror Blends by shooting arrows fight like likes by shooting arrows and then you kill the frogs for a bubble gem by shooting them with an arrow I got forged by the third cave and just did some more to confirm that they're all the same thing this content is a complete joke quantity over quality there's only one important side objective left to cover and we've saved the best for last let's talk about shrines at first I thought all the amazing shrines were packed tightly into Central Hyrule and then they fell off when you went into the surrounding regions but after reviewing my gameplay I realized that all my initial difficulty just came from me being new to using the fusion mechanic once I got used to my new abilities I quickly came to the realization that most shrines throughout Hyrule are fairly mechanically dull there's definitely a few great ones and there's even some clever ones but most of the solutions are pretty obvious I believe the initial difficulty from not being familiar with Fusion tricked many critics into thinking that the shrines had been greatly improved from breath of the wild I will not do a full Joseph Anderson breakdown of every Shrine because if I have to fly a light Crystal to another boring load screen Treasure Chest Shrine I think I'm gonna lose it but I can assure you that the quality of the shrines throughout Hyrule are either the same or only slightly better than before I cannot say the same for the shrines found in the sky which were consistently downright terrible out of the 152 total shrines 32 of them were in the sky and the vast majority of these were awful light Crystal non-puzzles at least in breath of the wild I was having fun exploring the new map so I didn't mind it too much when I arrived at a treasure Shrine chest but since I'm already bored of this map exploration didn't provide any enjoyment this meant that the only enjoyment I got from exploring was from the shrines and won at least half of them are either overly simplistic or a treasure chest I just start to get upset also in breath of the wild you usually had to solve one of cass's riddles to reach most Treasure Chest shrines and tears of the Kingdom you just have to fly a crystal to a destination to reach a treasure chest and that's all the gameplay you get maybe if I did a Joseph Anderson breakdown this game would have worse shrines actually I just really don't want to I just don't care that much I just don't want to play this game anymore but maybe it does I don't know it's it's not amazing moving on here's also introduces something even worse than the light Crystal shrines the tutorial shrines these shrines literally just teach players combat mechanics that you'll already know if you played breath of the wild just a waste of time they could have made a tutorial character and look out Landing to teach combat to new players but no they decide I did that the tutorial was so amazing that it should be Shrine content that you need to do to increase your health and stamina bars how did this game get a 10 out of 10. Cheers also doesn't do anything to make shrines more visually appealing than before a part of my immersion in a Zelda world comes from exploring visually distinct temples and dungeons that represent the culture of the region you are exploring just like in breath of the wild in tears every Shrine environment is just the same drab simple looking walls it's boring and uninspired what I wish the Zelda team would do is stop making shrines and instead create many dungeons that fit more naturally into the Overworld even if there would have to be a loading screen to get in and out of them like with shrines these dungeons would have different visuals depending on the region of the map you are exploring Death Mountain dungeons would kind of look like a fire temple Hyrule Field dungeons could be a mix of caves with puzzles and ancient looking Forest temples so on and so forth as I mentioned before I'd love it if these optional dungeons would vary greatly in size so that there's always a chance of stumbling across an amazing level all on your own that would be very cool and they reuse the map from the previous game and spent six years of development on this game and they still couldn't put a hidden dungeon they just didn't do it they did not they did not do or speaking of dungeon size let's talk about that part of the reason why I won't do a full breakdown of the quality of every Shrine is that even if every single one was good it still wouldn't matter because shrines that are one to three puzzles in length cannot replace the fun of an actual Zelda dungeon a part of the fun of a Zelda dungeon is that figuring out where to go and how to get there is a puzzle in and of itself in addition to this a long-form dungeon has more time to introduce mechanics to the player and expand upon those mechanics by slowly increasing the complexity of puzzles over time the format that shrines exist within is not conducive to creating actual good puzzles which is probably why so many of them are still disappointing even if this game spent six years in development and reused the previous Games map which I keep saying throughout this entire critique because I cannot believe it I've been pretty harsh on Shrine so far so it's time to talk about something good that they added to shrines the no item shrines these shrines take a concept introduced in the last games even tied Island where the player is stripped of all items and weapons and has to fight with only what they can find in the heat of battle no item shrines give link a couple of weak weapons at the start and then it's up to you to get more I enjoyed these combat shrines a lot every single combat Arena I found had at least somewhat clever level design the only issue is that you will be fighting the same reskinned robot Guardian enemies and you'll probably just abuse Spears and flurry rush for an easy win either way I still enjoy these combat challenges and think they were only held back by the lack of enemy variety and the issues with the combat system a big part of the reason why they're fun is probably due to the fact that you can't heal so there's finally a fight with some tension to conclude this section of the video on shrines I'll say this completing the shrines was the most fun I had while exploring Hyrule and a lot of them were either overly simple holistic or downright terrible and I disliked how they all had the same plain looking visuals in other words even my favorite side content in tears was still disappointing now that I've covered all the side objectives it's time I move on to the main story content this game follows a similar format to breath of the wild you explore the four regions that are in trouble and meet up with the hero of that respective region you go on a quest to kill a mini boss and then have to solve a riddle that is usually simple but left me feeling a bit clever this riddle opens up the way to a temple for the wind and water temple you have to do a long easy platforming gliding section to ascend to the temple since it's in the air this section isn't great or bad it's just mediocre it's okay it's visually cool I guess once you reach the temple you will realize that it reuses the terminal system from breath of the wild where the locations of importance in the dungeon are marked on your map and once you reach all of them them the door to the boss opens my notes after completing the wind and water temple looked something like this it's been six years of development and the dungeons are four puzzles long what why they reused the last game's map and they couldn't make a single good dungeon so that's my reaction to the dungeons that's my honest reaction now let's just walk through them and just analyze them the wind Temple is a cool looking Sky boat it's fun to Glide around the exterior looking for entrances to solve the puzzles I liked this Temple at first when I realized that the solution to a puzzle was to find an object in the environment to turn into a gear unfortunately this Temple is so mechanically simple that three of its four puzzles are the same just use a thing in the environment to turn the thing you need to turn or stick it into a gear COG the only other puzzle solution is to realize you need to fly to the bottom of the temple to reach the final objective I don't even know if this counts as a temple also I'm gonna say a lot throughout my analysis of these temples that there are only four puzzles long technically there are more than four puzzles long if you include treasure chests and getting to like maybe one or two puzzles but if you exclude repeat puzzles and non-puzzles then they start looking more like two puzzles Long hey it's editing feeble once again and I realized that I made a mistake kind of not really there's actually a fifth objective in the wind Temple but it doesn't really count as a puzzle you just climb a tower and dive through some x-rays I'd say this is less of a puzzle and more of a mini game but I thought I'd mention it anyways the water temple doesn't fare much better the puzzles are slightly less obvious if only because they don't repeat exact Concepts I enjoyed it when I realized that in order to reach the final room that is blocked by fire I had to fly to the bottom and use the ascent ability and that was kind of a cool moment if you exclude treasure chests and using the Ascend ability to reach the final puzzle this Temple is also only four puzzles long the fire temple fixes one issue I had with the previous two dungeons by making getting to each puzzle a puzzle in and of itself you have to figure out how to Traverse a system of mine carts to reach each objective which was fun although getting to each puzzle is more fun than before once you reach the puzzles they're even worse the solutions and how to get the Goron to hit each objective is so absurdly obvious that for most of this Temple's five objectives if I counted things that I actually consider to be a puzzle this dungeon would probably come out to about three or four Minecart puzzles they made traversing through the dungeon more fun while making the puzzles you reach even more boring also tears lets you solve puzzles in multiple ways which means that if you want to climb on the walls or use Fusion you can skip the only Channel challenging part of the temple which would bring the total number of real puzzles down to something like one the fire temple also reuses a non-puzzle from a shrine in Death Mountain reversing these Blocks made by the fire hydrant was also used in a shrine you can actually find many shrines reusing Concepts found in dungeons I don't know if I'm in a fine gameplay of it because I don't want to scour through all the footage of my shrines but creating a water wheel in the water temple was done in the shrine and using an object in the environment to create a lever like in the wind Temple was also done in a shrine and in the beginning puzzle of the lightning Temple also if you consider reusing exact puzzles as not being puzzles because you aren't using any thinking then the amount of puzzles in the dungeons decreases even more the lightning Temple is a compromise between the lackluster elements of the fire temple and the other two traversing through this dungeon has more complexity than the wind and water temples which had nothing going on since you have to find light sources and reflect them to different mirrors to progress and the puzzles you reach are slightly more involved than with the fire temple about on par with wind and water maybe this is the best Dungeon but I enjoyed figuring out how to Traverse the Minecarts in the fire temple more so the fire temple overall is still my favorite but not by much they're all pretty bad on the topic of bad dungeons there's only one left to cover and I saved the worst for last the construct Factory this dungeon is built around the fusion mechanic of building Vehicles this carries over all the problems I mentioned in the vehicle section of the essay I can't Auto build since the robot squares are unique parts so I need to slowly create every new vehicle to progress if you mess up building a vehicle you either need to use more resources for another try or reload a save that resets all your progress the puzzle solutions are almost always obvious non-puzzles but the amount of time spent building the vehicles to solve the puzzles is long and tedious that is the main issue this is the only dungeon that has a lot more than four puzzles to solve and it's the only dungeon that I wish was a lot shorter although if you exclude non-puzzles maybe this dungeon has zero puzzles I don't know if I use my brain to think in this one the only time I use my brain in this entire dungeon was to create the water vehicle that also had wheels and then you had to drive it out that was the only time the only Silver Lining to this whole dungeon is that driving the final Vehicles out of each section of the dungeon to return to the robot body was kind of fun I like driving over bokoblins GTA style but it's not worth the boredom of building the vehicles now that we've covered all five of the short dungeons let's talk about the bosses they are better than in breath of the wild but like something I say a lot throughout this video that isn't really an achievement since that game had awful boss battles probably the worst in the series these bosses are fun and simple but there can't be any tension unless you're doing a challenge run due to infinite healing I think Queen gibdo was the best Dungeon boss out of the five and the only one worth breaking down the mechanics of you have to shoot it with electricity twice to get an opening and it shoots at least somewhat difficult to avoid tornadoes to defend itself when weakened in Phase 2 the boss starts spamming the player with enemy spam while doing normal attacks you have to then shoot the gibdo hives that are spawning enemies to reveal sunlight that instantly kills them now I'm thinking about it I could have just infused My Arrows with electricity and maybe just completely cheese this Boss by not relying on reju's lightning magic but if you don't do that then this boss was kind of fun to pull off now it's time to talk about the story they decided to use voice actors in breath of the wild and they just weren't very good the voice actor I disliked the most was Zelda as she sounded less like a woman and more like a high-pitched Disney princess Zelda's voice actor did a better job in tears of the Kingdom than in breath of the wild but I still disagree with the type of voice they chose to cast her Zelda incredible this mural must be the Great War recorded in the Royal histories I wish that she sounded more human and grounded fortunately the new voice actors are all pretty good whoever cast the voice actors for Tears did a much better job than the casting director for breath of the wild unless it's the same person then they just improved at their job raru and Sonia always sounded good as do all the sages when you talk to them at the end of each Temple and obviously Matthew Mercer as Ganondorf is by far my favorite every scene with Matthew Mercer was a great scene and he did an amazing job at his Super Evil voice cheers has a better story than its predecessor but that isn't really an achievement because breath of the wild had barely any story to speak of there are new memory cut scenes that link can find all over Hyrule which tell an interesting story about what happened to Zelda after she traveled ten thousand years back in time to witness the events of the imprisoning war it's intriguing to see little Snippets of ganondorf's rise to power and the fight between the king raru and Ganondorf was really cool although the memory cut scenes are far better than the ones in breath of the wild they still carry over the same problem from the last game it seems like the entire plot would have been a lot better if link was teleported 10 000 years into the past so that he could experience the imprisoning war as it happened in fact the whole game would be a lot more interesting if it took place ten thousand years ago Nintendo would have to make the villages and people look significantly different because of the time difference and you would be an active participant in the most captivating parts of the story rather than just observing them through memories if they went above and beyond with this concept they could have redone some of the biomes and towns entirely to make parts of Hyrule feel completely new but instead we just got tears of the Kingdom unfortunately for us Nintendo thought that the breath of the wild formula for storytelling was perfect and they decided to forgo making the main character an active participant in the most important story beats I can't State how much I disagree with this choice and do not want to see this formula return in the next game I want to be a part of the story not watching from the sidelines through memories I'll say it Skyward Sword did it better moving on now we're getting into heavy spoiler territory if you don't want to get spoiled please skip to the end of the story section after you collect all of the memories you receive an additional memory that shows how Zelda decided to turn herself into an immortal Dragon infused with the master sword ten thousand years ago so that the master sword could gain strength I thought this was a cool story beat as Ganondorf was building power in the depths for ten thousand years which meant the only way to combat so much power was for the Master Sword to slowly gain power in the same way for ten thousand years after learning this link goes up to Dragon Zelda and pulls out the master sword and even after ten thousand years of being bathed in the sacred light of Zelda's Soul who is actually The Reincarnation of the Goddess hylia now in Dragon form the master sword still runs out of energy after a couple of fights but it's so lame I understand why they do it for gameplay but it is pretty lame with all five sages and the master sword collected link can Journey Into the Depths below Hyrule to defeat Ganondorf for some inexplicable reason link goes down there alone even though it's dangerous to go alone rather than wait for all five sages to join him even though the power of a sage can't reach him past a certain point in the depths and his character should probably just leave because he's not really in a rush to fight Ganondorf you still don't do that they do this for a stupid story beat that we'll get to in a second this final stretch of level was absolutely awful The Depths below Hyrule has a crap ton of reskinned enemies with no Puzzles to speak of I cannot State enough how boring this final level was I cannot bring myself to kill bokoblin number 5072 it's just so absurdly dull once you reach the bottom Ganondorf sends an army of enemies to attack the player and the sages show up at the last second epically to help Link in his time of need even though he just shouldn't have gone there alone I just view this fight as the developer's final way of ensuring that I have to fight more reskinned enemies they're like no no no no no you didn't get enough of this combat system this broken combat system it's really good you should fight the same enemies again that you already fought breath of the wild let's do it again again and again and again and again anyways the final fight against Ganondorf is cool Ganondorf uses multiple different weapons with different timings and attack directions that you need to memorize which direction to Dodge in and the timing to get flurry rush in his third phase he can counter your flurry Rush with the flurry Rush that you need to flurry Rush sounds kind of funny this ping pong game of flurry rushing is a throwback to the ping pong fight you have with phase one Ganondorf in Ocarina of Time which was pretty cool Ganondorf is obviously the best most mechanically interesting boss in all of Tears of the kingdom and the fight also feels very very dramatic and cool because of the dialogue in Matthew Mercer's performance it was just really well done after link defeats Ganondorf he gets upset that he lost after 10 000 years of waiting and honestly I'd be upset too if I was him so he eats his sacred stone to murder link just like with how this turned Zelda into a dragon this turns Ganondorf into a dragon which kind of fits with the theme of the story of sacrificing yourself to embody some type of sacred power this leads to a mechanically simple spectacle fight kind of like how breath of the wild ended but this time the spectacle is way cooler and the mechanics are slightly better you dive off of Dragon Zelda while dodging ganon's fire breath to hit his weak spots with the master sword it's a fun spectacle and it feels really fitting to end the game all about traversing through the sky with the boss battle in the sky after Ganondorf is defeated raru and his wife Sonia use light magic to turn Zelda back into a Hylian link catches her and they both fall into this tiny Lake and die nah I'm just kidding even the tiniest bodies of water in Hyrule are still 20 feet deep for some reason overall this story is all right it would have been much better if link traveled back in time to witness the imprisoning war firsthand but at least the final again indoor fight was pretty cool I'm going to end this video by talking about precisely why tears of the kingdom is a failure of a game this part of the video is going to be more subjective about my feelings but I think many Zelda fans will be able to relate playing through traditional Zelda games gives me a feeling unlike any other ever since I was around 12 years old I called this the Zelda feeling a feeling only felt while playing Zelda games this is probably the result of a few things traveling through a creative world with interesting towns and people to meet connecting with link as he traverses through the hero's journey overcoming bosses with Creative Solutions experiencing the Epic Story uncovering the ancient History of the World by exploring creative dungeon and of course solving the brilliant puzzles that are just difficult enough for you to feel very smart after solving them without usually being so hard that you constantly get stuck unless it's Majora's Mask this combination of elements results in the Zelda feeling and even a bad Zelda game is usually still a good game breath of the wild does not give me the Zelda feeling because it doesn't have nearly enough elements of the traditional Zelda games instead it gives me a new feeling the breath of the wild feeling this feeling is all about exploring a vast open world through the traversal mechanics of mainly climbing and gliding it's a joy to uncover cool looking biomes and towns at your own pace with complete freedom to go where you want as it makes your adventure unique you see something cool in the distance well you just created a new adventure for yourself go see what that's all about although I do not enjoy the breath of the wild feeling as much as the Zelda feeling I still do very much enjoy this feeling and I am glad that breath of the wild exists because it was able to redefine what a Zelda game could be and it was the creative spark that Zelda needed to keep going into the modern era this game was so Innovative that it spawned a new genre of breath of the Wild's clones just as Ocarina of Time did 19 years prior as I mentioned in the introduction I wanted Nintendo to unite the feelings of both traditional Zelda and breath of the wild into one amazing Masterpiece and instead we got tears of the Kingdom this game's main story Quest isn't very long just five short quest lines that lead to Five Short temples despite being overly simplistic some of the temples are still fun but each one is so short that it only makes up about five hours of content in this massive almost 100 hour RPG probably longer if you do more side objectives when I would start to questline and do the temple I would almost start to get the Zelda feeling and then I'd be kicked out to the Overworld and that feeling would be gone there isn't enough Zelda for me to feel like I'm playing a Zelda game even worse there isn't enough breath of the wild for me to have the breath of the wild feeling either breath of the wild introduces loads of new biomes in its map of Hyrule while tears only introduces two new environments one in the depths and one in the sky there's also nothing of interest to do in the sky world and there's even less to do in the depths and there's no excitement when exploring Hyrule because I've already seen it all before what this means is that tears of the Kingdom manages to fail both as a traditional Zelda game and as a breath of the wild game while also not fixing any of the major issues that breath of the wild had the only major new mechanic is building vehicles but the game doesn't set up fun challenges that would make the player want to build Vehicles instead you just fly light crystals and Clorox from point A to point B vehicle building should be the game's primary selling point but in reality it's just another disappointment I'm going to end this video by talking about how I feel like a crazy person who lives on a different planet than everybody else how did this game get so many tens is it groupthink our game critics a glorified marketing team probably the 4 out of five dungeons are basically four puzzles long and reuse puzzles from shrines and reuse puzzle solutions within the same dungeon the combat system breaks quicker in this game than the weapons do a lot of the shrines are boring especially in the sky world the sky world has literally nothing of Interest The Depths is a boring pit of reskinned enemies with little to do the enemy Variety in this game is absolutely awful there's only three real weapon move sets and the game reuses the same map from breath of the wild so it was not fun to re-explore a world I was already familiar with also this game has some frame rate issues because it's running on Old Hardware but this flaw is barely worth mentioning when the game is mired by so many larger issues I am actually so confused right now how aren't more people upset by this game are reviewers becoming more lenient because every other game release is a broken mess at launch and at least tears of the kingdom is a functional game my honest prediction is that people are just in the honeymoon phase with this game and once they snap out of it more people will see this game for what it is which is the worst 3D Zelda game by far if you had not already played breath of the wild maybe this game will be more enjoyable for you than it was for me because the map will be new for you but for those of us who have beaten breath of the wild this game is inexcusable the only other thing I really have to say to sum up my disappointment is that I waited six years and I feel like I didn't even get a new Zelda experience this just feels like I replayed breath of the wild and killed a bunch of the same book hoblins again and went in a bunch of samey looking shrines again I feel like I didn't even experience a new Zelda game or a new Zelda World it just feels like I waited six years for nothing that's really what this game feels like so yeah I'll leave you with that [Music] foreign [Music]

Channel: Feeble King

Views: 243,222

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Id: n_ZgCq_g1qk

Length: 55min 29sec (3329 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 01 2023