Tears of the Kingdom Critique: Open Worlds Are Dead

[Music] foreign The Legend of Zelda series is one of the oldest and most successful franchises in the games industry and even a cursory glance down as corridors makes it easy to see why in its more than 35 years of existence older than most of you watching it's changed the game and set the Standard Time and Again from the groundbreaking Freedom offered by the original game to the Timeless formula established and linked to the past to one of the most mind-bogglingly effective transitions to 3D of all time followed by a sequel that in some ways is even more impressive and original from there however I hope it's not too controversial to say that the series started spinning its wheels for a while with gimmicks and twists stepping in to fill the hole created by a lack of more innovative ideas just when things were at their stay list and most formulaic Nintendo released breath of the wild and gave this series the shot in the arm it desperately needed they threw out the rule book and started from scratch and I think most would agree that the results were astoundingly successful that emphasis on freedom was back in a big way with the exploration of its massive Urban World taking place however the player wanted it to gone were the puzzles are enemies with a single solution or weakness now players had a near Limitless amount of choice in how they accomplished their goals and for the most part were even trusted to decide on those goals for themselves it wasn't so much puzzle solving as it was problem solving and anything that got you to the ending was a valid answer including running straight from the tutorial to the final boss the game had its share of lows but the highs could be very high six years later breath of the wild now has a sequel of its own in tears of the kingdom and sadly it seems that Nintendo has fallen back into its old routine of sticking with an established formula the most obvious and controversial holdover between the two games is probably the world map which is reused in its entirety and it's hard not to be disappointed by that when so much of the original game's appeal was in discovering new environments for the first time there are new areas to discover in tears but I'll discuss later why I don't think these new additions are wholly successful and in the worst cases even make the game mature to play in terms of combat tears controls more or less identically to the previous game although with some tweaks to how weapon durability works that I think are mostly positive again I'll get to that shrines also make a comeback from the last game each one of bare bones morsel of problem solving that's barely worth the two loading screens you have to sit through to get in and out my opinion on these is negative in case you can't tell while there is a precedent in the Zelda series for reusing ideas and assets between games Majora's Mask being the obvious example the wholesale copying and pasting of the map combat and Shrine concept from the last game doesn't sit right with me in Majora's Mask old assets were reused to achieve a quick turnaround in development sure but that game also recontextualized those assets and characters by putting them into a new Twisted environment I'm sorry to say that in tears of the Kingdom the ReUse feels more down to a lack of imagination on Nintendo's part or at the very least an unwillingness to try something new after striking it lucky with breath of the Wild but I'm being too negative of course there are some new ideas and tears of the Kingdom stuck on top of the base established by the previous game like a korok glued onto a hastily constructed torture device Chief among these new additions is the ability to join items together in Endless configurations to make bridges Vehicles ladders shelter or pretty much anything else an imaginative player Can Dream up in the early hours of a playthrough with all of these infinite possibilities in front of you it's easy to be awestruck by the complexity of this game you've no doubt seen elsewhere some of the amazingly clever and creative Contraptions that players have put together and it's a real Testament to the potential of the game's emergent systems that stuff like that is possible but just because it's possible doesn't mean that the game encourages or rewards you for experimenting in that way making a musical device that plays the Boss music from undertale is obviously amazingly inventive but it doesn't get the player any closer to the end credits I'm almost certain that the average player isn't gonna dig quite this deeply into the building mechanics because the game never gives you a good reason to instead the average player is more likely to be building the same three vehicles over and over again which gets a little bit old after 60 hours to say the least and whoops there I go being negative again I'm aware that this entire intro will come across as overwhelmingly cynical so I want to clarify that I think tears of the kingdom is a well-made game but it's a game that just barely scratches the surface of what could be possible with this much complexity in mechanics and it's my disappointment of that fact that shines through most when I think about it the first dozen hours I spent with it were really enjoyable and consistently intriguing as I was constantly learning more about the potential and the limits of the new features but the hundred hours after that had precious little nudity and every problem I encountered was solved with the same simplistic Solutions I'd been using since the tutorial to put it simply the first time you construct a glider to get across the map quickly it feels like an absolute Revelation the fifth time it feels a bit played out by the 20th time it's become a Mindless chore with no interesting decisions involved and by then you'll probably even have the ability that auto built it for you in this way tears of the Kingdom's ridiculously huge scope ends up bringing the whole experience down there's so much repetition that a full playthrough feels like playing the same game four times in a row if your first 10 hours give you enough time to understand the incredible amount of potential in all of this game's interconnected systems then the remaining 100 will give you more than enough time to start resenting the fact that the game does very very little with that potential if you two have gone through the effort of seeing every part of this gargantuan game then I hope that by the end of this video you'll agree with me bigger is not better and that's about as much as I can say before I start getting specific and spoilery despite all my complaints so far I do think the tears of the kingdom is worth a try especially if you haven't played breath of the wild if I didn't feel compelled to keep playing and finish everything for the sake of this video it's very possible that I might have had a much better time with the game although it's hardly a compliment to say that the game gets better when you ignore half of it as always your mileage may vary so this is your last chance to drop out and play the game for yourself before watching the rest of this video thank you foreign first off a few quick words about this game's presentation including the story and music despite all the very valid complaints I'm gonna make there is still a lot to love in this game and clearly a vast amount of passion personality and Care were put into it the visuals and music are highlights in particular and this can be a very beautiful game when conditions are right how many games can make a painting with every frame of animation as for the music there are plenty of memorable Tunes both new and returning and the Spooky rendition of the Zora theme is a particular standout for me I was actually a little disappointed when I finished their main quest and the music went back to normal in general I'm a big fan of the understated music that leads you to wander the open world mostly in silence just fading in and out occasionally when it wants to make an impression one of the combat themes in particular I really enjoyed with the Frantic strings imparting a real feel of desperation that made me feel guilty when I was abusing the stunlock while it was playing when it comes to the story it's harmless and can mostly be ignored but that succeeded in making me care about it at exactly one point the reveal of Zelda's sacrifice in the past that turned her into an immortal Dragon of course at the end they completely cop out and let her turn back into a human anyway so I don't know why they bothered for the remainder of the story cutscenes I was at best patiently waiting to regain control and at worst cringing out of my seat thankful that nobody else could see me listening to this dialogue and voice acting power the story is both a sequel and a prequel which is sure to get anyone still obsessing over the Zelda Timeline frothing at the mouth I think most sensible people are well beyond caring about establishing any kind of definitive timeline by now and I highly doubt Nintendo puts much thought into it either but there is nevertheless something compelling about seeing the same names themes and motifs appearing over and over again throughout the ages as if the actions you carry out in each game are just a single stitch in the unfathomable fabric of time it's a fitting thematic concept for one of the oldest Series in gaming that's already seen multiple creators and personalities fade in and Fade Out from the development team and all signs point to A continuing for decades to come in one form or another but banking on Nostalgia and the inertia of brand recognition for sales has led to stagnation before and it will again if Nintendo isn't able to keep innovating so let's get into the gameplay itself and see how it works the overall structure of Tears of the Kingdom looks much the same as his predecessor when you're done with the tutorial area you're able to explore in whichever direction you like with some markers on the map for the main quests which are better off disabled in my opinion just like the previous game you have the option of seeking out the final boss and seeing the credits roll at any time including immediately after the tutorial but no sane person is going to do that on a first playthrough assuming you are saying then the Lion's Share of that first playthrough will consist of spotting something interesting on the horizon heading towards it and then getting distracted by a dozen other points of interest along the way and when this works it works really well especially in the early game but before getting into that let's take a quick look at the tutorial and How It prepares the player for the remainder of the game it gets the player introduced to combat movement Inventory management and everything else that's carried over from breath of the wild but the most interesting and memorable Parts here are the introductions to the new abilities in this game first up is ultra Hand by far the ability you'll be using the most over a playthrough both to move things and to stick them together and you'll quickly start using it to make bridges over gaps or to hook platforms onto rails you'll also be taught about building powered vehicles using zonai devices when you have to construct a raft to carry you across a body of water remember this one because it will be coming up again and again and again and again later also introduced here is the fusibility which is used to attach items to a weapon Shield or arrow for various different effects with a number of applications for combat and Resource Management that I'll get to later the other two abilities are recall which rewinds in object's movements and Ascent which launches you through the roof over your head and brings you out on the floor above it both of these abilities are quite specific and don't see anywhere near the amount of use that Ultra hand and fuse do and finally another important takeaway from the tutorial is an understanding of just how interconnected and complex the different systems of this game can get temperature Wind Fire rain all of these factors can have Dynamic effects on both the player and the objects around them both beneficial and detrimental and these Dynamic effects can be deliberately exploited and played with to accomplish your goals Dynamic is the key word there as all of these interactions take place in real time here's a comparison to another game that I think gets right to the heart of what I mean by that in Red Dead Redemption 2 you can light a campfire and rest in the Wilderness or by the side of the road or wherever you are to do this you have to open the game's radial menu then scroll over and select the right option and that's it Arthur will choose an appropriate place nearby and set up a little campfire on his own from here you can get access to further menus that you can use to cook food and craft consumables in tears of the Kingdom you that is to said the player need to find a pile of wood place it wherever the campfire is going to go and then find a way to light it one of the more obvious ways to do this is by putting a piece of flint next to the wood and striking it but something like a magic fire Rod would do the trick too and there you go there's your campfire if you want to use it to cook food you can drop it near the fire and watch it transform even at a glance I think it's plain to see the different levels of interactivity at play in these two examples Red Dead Redemption sees the action abstracted out into a menu whereas Zelda asks you to assemble the required bits together and then to actually commit the act of lighting the fire yourself using the same attack button you use for countless other interactions like so many other things in new Zelda lighting a campfire is a problem to be solved using whatever means available to you all of this is possible because of the always in play chemistry system that allows items to interact with each other and change State according to certain criteria now if you're familiar with the game then you may be tapping out an irritated comment complaining that I purposely omitted some menu use from this campfire example to make Zelda look better and you're right I did do that and I'll come back to why that was necessary but for now just humor me and go along with my assertion that in the ideal Zelda play session the item menu wouldn't need to be opened even once the game is by far at its best when every encounter or puzzle independently provides you with the tools needed to get through it as I hope to show with the rest of this video to finish up my thoughts on the tutorial I found my first time going through it to be really enjoyable although its length can make your second time through a bit tedious somewhat ironically despite the almost unbelievable amount of Freedom you have for the majority of the game the linear intro might be the longest in Zelda history and hours will pass before you get your hands on the paraglider still on a first playthrough I think the tutorial succeeds and learning and experimenting with the rules of this game is likely to leave you or struck at the seemingly Limitless potential of all of its interconnected systems placing a motorized fan on a rail car and riding it along a track makes you feel like a genius cutting down trees and joining them together to make a climbable pole of a slippery surface makes you feel like you've outsmarted the developers gliding across the sky on a flying wing and changing its direction by shifting your weight on top of it is so liberating that it makes you feel like you've broken the game somehow this all sounds great doesn't it and it is great for the first 10 or 20 hours When Everything feels new and you're still learning how everything works the tutorial and early hours of the game do an amazing job at getting you excited for the boundless possibilities that the rest of the world holds but the longer you play the more you'll come to realize that it's rarely capable of delivering on that promise and you'll spend the next hundred hours using the same Solutions and building the same Contraptions until all the joy and one have been sucked out of it but let's not think about that just yet let's just explore the world a bit and enjoy seeing the possibilities unfold in front of us since you're free to explore in whichever direction you like every player will see things and make discoveries in a different order finding these geoglyphs around the map is how you unlock story Tim bits and descending on them from above to look for the right spot is a clever use of this game's emphasis on verticality I particularly like the one that's partially obscured by a forest meaning you have to make a leap of logic to find what you're looking for if you're familiar with the previous game it won't blow your mind to see a dragon soaring majestically through the sky but it might when you first see one flying through a Chasm into the underground depths catching a nice looking horse and registering it in a stable can be rewarding and is pretty much a mandatory inclusion in the Zelda game but it's only a matter of time until you realize riding horses is kind of useless as soon as you come across a steep slope or body of water you'll have to Dismount and you'll be back on foot after a quick climb or swim while it may not be strictly realistic there is a logic to how the world is laid out that can be really satisfying to piece together almost every NPC will comment on the weather or time of day and will also clue you in on stuff to look forward to doing later like the Rito Quest following a flock of keys can lead you to Cave entrances which is a detail I really love hot springs on the surface occur above spots of underground volcanic activity being on the cloud cover in the desert reduces your temperature all of these were things that I worked out for myself without the game telling me and discovering rules and then exploiting them can be one of the most satisfying things about playing a complicated game like this as for the minute to minute exploration it has to be said that reusing the map from breath of the wild has Stripped Away some of the joy of Discovery from the game which is a real shame but there's still a fairly high density of things to interact with my Approach To The Sky View Tower north of the great Forest offers a good example of how your to-do list can quickly spiral out of control while wandering the world these towers are used to add regions to your map and can also be used to quickly get into the sky so finding and unlocking them is usually the first thing you'll want to do in each region while making my way towards the tower I spotted multiple shrines and dropped markers on them when I got to the tower itself I had to figure out how to open it and there was an NPC with a side quest available at the bottom as well when I activated the tower and got launched into the sky I now had a choice between exploring the nearby Sky Islands going back to the shrine side marked looking into that side quest or heading for the geoglyph I could see nearby getting lost in this exploratory Loop of seeing something to do and heading towards it only to get distracted by several more things to do on the way is one of the primary joys of playing this game it does start to wear a little thin over time especially after you've started seeing the same content repeated in different locations but I want to continue being positive about the game for a bit so I'll carry on talking about the earlier parts of a playthrough before the player has had a chance to realize how repetitive this game can be as promised in the intro there are new areas to discover on top of the map carried over from the previous game literally on top of it in the case of the sky islands and archipelagos that can now be found floating above Hyrule navigating around them comes with an element of risk that makes it more enjoyable than it would be otherwise although some of this Mystique is lost when you start unlocking shrines in the sky that can be teleported to at any time still approach with the right mindset the sky archipelagos can provide some of the most engaging environmental interactions in the whole game thanks to the more restrictive environment if you think of them as a chain of islands where each one is a self-contained puzzle with the goal of working out how to get yourself to the next Island then there's a lot of satisfaction to be had in cobbling together an improvised solution from the materials in front of you the archipelago near the Rito Village was the most memorable of these for me to get from one of the islands to another that was higher up I had to drop down to a lower level through a hole then craft a bridge with a spring on top to launch myself back up through the hole and glide over this was some incredibly satisfying problem solving using the materials provided by the environment to find a way to accomplish my goals and it speaks volumes that I remember it so clearly after more than 100 hours of play time when so much else has blurred into memory mush in my head unfortunately it's incredibly easy to break these navigational challenges and completely trivialize them and in fact the game actively encourages you to break them in multiple ways but well I'm supposed to be being positive right now so we'll come back to that also added to the Overworld are the caves I briefly mentioned earlier which occasionally can turn a surprising amount of enemies treasures minibuses and other Collectibles and are also the places where you're most likely to use the Ascend ability if you haven't forgotten that it exists the features of these caves that I found most interesting are the tunnels choked with rocks that need to be cleared to pass through once again providing an open-ended problem that needs to be solved using resourcefulness the solution taught to you in the tutorial is to craft a hammer by using the new fuse ability to attach a rock or something blunt to a weapon then smashing through the rocks with that when you're first introduced to it this feels like an amazing idea and a genius improvement over the previous game in breath of the wild where bombs were available in infinite Supply it would have been effortless and therefore boring to throw bomb after bomb at any obstacle to blow your way through without access to infinite bombs and with every swing of a weapon draining its durability Tis of the Kingdom turned these rocks into a resource training question that needs to be given some thoughts at least in the beginning of your playthrough when you finished exploring a cave the fact that you can exit using the tunnel you dug yourself is just a beautiful cherry on top in a similar vein to this rock problem you don't need to look for an ax to cut down a tree you can make one by fusing a weapon with something sharp it was a stunning realization when it clicked that the ax I picked up in the tutorial was just a ready-made fused weapon the fact that you can also attach items that will create gusts of wind or add Elemental attacks to your weapons or Shields or stick items onto arrows to increase their damage or change their properties means that once again the possibilities feel endless at this early stage when it comes to arrows I particularly like that you don't craft them in advance fire arrows bomb arrows and any other variation you can think of are all crafted on the fly at point of use and I really think this is a stroke of Brilliance the other new major area added to the game is the depths a gigantic underground Zone that's like a twisted inversion of the land of Hyrule above it languishing in darkness and infested with this Gloomy muck taken together with the sky islands these two new areas seem almost like Nintendo's deliberate reply to Elton Brink oh what's that your game had an extra map screen ours has two suck on that Miyazaki while in the depths you're subject to the effects of Gloom which means that Hearts lost can't be replenished with ordinary food until you return to the surface or to a light root it's a nice tweak that means it's not quite as easy to pause and heal your way out of danger which in turn means that combat in the depth feels a bit more dangerous than on the surface and in the early game when combat is still remotely enjoyable this can make it a bit more interesting sorry I couldn't help myself in terms of exploration The Depths introduces an intriguing problem to solve by asking you to find a way to illuminate the environment they go all the way with it too there's no ambient light whatsoever and without the use of some kind of resource or consumable it really will be too dark to see anything you can solve this problem by throwing bright Bloom seeds wearing clothing that illuminates carrying a weapon with a luminous Stone fuse to it or cooking and eating a meal that gives you a temporary brightness buff so there are plenty of options although personally I found that bright Bloom seeds put all the others to shame and are abundant enough that I was never even close to running out this becomes irrelevant over time anyway as you explode The Depths further and activate these light Roots which light up the region around them my own first experience with the depths was very different to the one that I think Nintendo intended I was exploring the Overworld as normal and came across a well and all the other Wells I'd seen up to this point had a little room inside them with maybe a chest or something small like that so imagine my surprise when I jumped down this well and kept falling and falling and falling until I was in total darkness and didn't even know how much further down there was to go I figured out for myself how to use bright Bloom seeds to light up my surroundings and discovered on my own the risks and rewards of engaging with Gloom infested enemies when I spotted a gigantic route in the distance my own curiosity led me to it because it looked like something important I'm so glad I discovered the depths on my own like this without the game leading me here because unexpectedly ending up in a whole other map with new rules to learn and new dangers to avoid was easily one of the highlights of my playthrough compare that experience to the official introduction to the depths that the main quest markers guide you through where you drop next to an NPC who tells you exactly what to do and you're only seconds away from a light route that can be used to immediately brighten your surroundings you spend basically no time at all in the dark if you follow this intended path and I'm seriously glad that my first encounter with the depths happened on my own terms rather than as part of this over tutorialized busy work that the game forces you into on the one hand it's a credit to the game that is even possible to do things out of order as I did and to discover things on your own without them being shoved down your throat on the other hand however it's a ridiculous waste of the player's time to still force them through that tutorial hours later even after they've already taught themselves everything they need to know whichever way you introduce yourself to the depths the longer you spend down there the closer you'll come to realizing that exploring it is more or less pointless because there's nothing to do yes there are enemy camps yiga Clan outposts and minibuses to find but once you've seen one you've seen them all and they will all sooner or later become just another thing to avoid when trying to get from A to B there's precious little to justify the inclusion of the depths and while it makes a great first impression with its size and scale this quickly wears off and it could easily have been reduced by half or even three quarters with nothing of value being lost the only other benefit I can see of it being so massive is that it provides a clever way of cluing the player into the location of shrines on the surface it took me an embarrassing number of hours before it suddenly clicked that light roots in the depths and shrines on the surface are in the same locations so it's easy enough to compare both maps to pick up on ones you may have missed while the completionist in me did appreciate the helping hand it has to be said that this Stripped Away yet another layer of Mystery the deaths and what felt like an intimidating space at the beginning of my playthrough became a repetitive chore well before the halfway mark and with that I can no longer avoid getting into the main theme of my criticism for tears of the kingdom and you may have already noticed a pattern emerging in what I've let slip so far in almost every area of this game's design what first feels like an intriguing and interesting problem to solve will sooner or later turn into a repetitive grind that you want to get through as quickly as possible by deploying whatever solution worked the fastest last time in the case of combat that solution is often to just ignore or avoid enemies entirely and I'll divert a whole section of the video later to that issue when it comes to exploration though the same problem raises had returning to the depths for a minute part of the navigational challenge down here comes from avoiding the patches of Gloom on the ground since it rains your hearts in the early stages of a playthrough you might do this by climbing a tree or wall to get some height and glide over or by building a bridge or finding another route or finding a vehicle or skeletal horse to ride over it you get the idea there's a lot of ways to solve this problem once you've played for long enough that you've reached a certain number of Hearts however all of these imaginative Solutions become total waste of time compared to the effortless answer of running straight through the gloom and just eating the damage maybe you would call this progression I would call it boring for another example of how potentially interesting problems can be trivialized we can look at the way rain stops you from climbing I actually really like this idea in theory since it provides a problem that prompts the player to reach their destination using alternative means in practice however it's frustrating and will often lead to you just sitting around waiting for the rain to stop it's especially maddening when the rain starts halfway through a climb and you have to abandon it the issue here is that the rain problem is tied to time meaning that the easiest and least costly solution in terms of resources is to just wait for the rain to stop which is obviously very boring but also very sensible in regions of the map where rain is permanent and it's not possible to wait it out I think the idea is implemented much more successfully if climbing is permanently off the table as a solution then you're forced to find another way unlocking the sky view Tower in this permanently drenched region of the map is also made more interesting by the never-ending rain the entrance is strangled by Thorns which would ordinarily be effortless to burn through but with the constant rain putting out fires you're forced to get creative and find a way around this problem in my case by building a shelter over the Thorns to keep them dry before burning them imagine if it was possible to solve this problem by just waiting for the rain to stop and I think you'll see what a positive difference it can make to place interesting restrictions on the player at the moments where the player is somehow restricted were among the most memorable and enjoyable in the game for me like the sandstorm in the Gerudo desert that forces you to gain height in order to get visibility or the blizzard in the Rito Quest removing the minimap the fact that Nintendo mostly reserves this kind of thing for the main quests suggests to me that they have some awareness of how much more interesting the game becomes when restrictions like this are in play as it happens however for the vast vast majority of a playthrough the game does almost nothing to restrict the player and I think this is one of the biggest factors that led to my enjoyment of it constantly declining the longer I spent playing example one at almost any given moment the player can open the inventory menu and change their clothing for different benefits like temperature resistance extra damage faster climbing or swimming speed or faster skydiving but the thing is at any one time the player is going to be fighting or swimming or climbing or skydiving never more than one for this reason there are absolutely no interesting decisions to be made around clothing only an irritating trip to the menu every time you switch to a different activity which is pretty damn frequently for all intents and purposes the effects granted by clothing might as well be permanent upgrades but they're not the only clothing sets that buck this trend are the ones that regulate temperature because you might find yourself in a hot or cold environment while still climbing or fighting prompting the player to make some kind of trade-off while this is better than nothing the excessive menu usage it causes means that it's still not particularly enjoyable with the Gerudo desert being the worst region for this by far different times of day require different clothing to avoid losing hearts if the player was restricted from changing clothing it will like this then every Excursion into Uncharted Territory would necessitate some kind of thoughtful choice about clothing and equipment example two at almost any given moment the player can open the inventory menu and spawn a vehicle out of nowhere for a relatively low resource cost and these vehicles can be used to solve practically any navigational challenge in the game there are even multiple ways of doing this you can spawn a vehicle directly from the auto build menu or you can drop individual devices from your inventory and join them together manually think back to my example from before of the sky archipelago near the Rito Village what I enjoyed about it was that I was able to improvise a solution to the problem of traveling to the next Island using only the materials in front of me in the back of my mind though on some level I was aware that there was always an alternative solution available to me by opening my inventory and instantly spawning a vehicle or Contraption there's no conscious thought no engagement with the environment and crucially no real problem solving involved in such a solution the fact that these boring one-size-fits-all Contraptions are freely available to the player for 90 of their playthrough means that the player is very rarely put in a position where they actually have to engage with the world around them after all if the developers know that I'm capable of flying wherever I like using the same vehicle every time what reason do they have to think of interesting alternative ways of getting somewhere once this toxic info Hazard had truly taken root in my mind there was no longer anything interesting to me about moving around the game's world there isn't a single navigational challenge that can't be solved by using the same two or three constructions over and over again need to gain height just spawn a hot air balloon need to cover some distance just spawn a wing a korok needs to be reunited with his friend no problem just stick him on a wing or a car or a raft and Scoot on over actually just a wing will suffice in the majority of cases that is if it's not one of those cases where you don't even need a vehicle at all and can just walk him to his destination seriously what's the point of this it's mindless vapid content example 3 at almost any given moment the player can open the inventory menu and drop or throw pretty much any item they've picked up during their playthrough whether it was five minutes ago or 50 hours ago since picking up items is so easy you'll be grabbing everything that's not nailed down and your inventory will very quickly balloon this inventory is practically Limitless in size and it certainly feels that way when you're scrolling through it item by item searching for something in particular once again I can point to one of my previous examples to reveal how the unlimited inventory Works to ruin it it's true that lighting a fire is done by placing Flint next to Wood and striking it but what I left out earlier is that you can simply open your inventory and drop some wood wherever you like then do the same for Flint and yet again there's absolutely no need whatsoever to engage with your environment or think critically about the options available to you because you have every option you could ever possibly need freely accessible in your pocket thanks to this building a campfire in Zelda is equally as brainless as it is in Red Dead Redemption except it actually ends up involving even more menu usage than that game which I think is an incredibly revealing fact in all of these examples the ease of changing clothing the ease of spawning overpowered Vehicles the ease of instantly summoning any items you've ever touched the root of the problem lies with the Colossal inventory that the player has constant access to and the unavoidable conclusion this leads me to is that the game would have been better off with no inventory at all for one thing it would cut down on the ludicrous amount of menu use that plagues the game in its current state but more importantly it would give the player the chance or rather the responsibility to actually pay attention to their surroundings and make use of the problem-solving part of their brain which surely is supposed to be the whole point of a game like this it should go without saying that playing without an inventory would be infinitely more engaging and interesting than constantly selecting ready-made solutions from a menu which if you catch me on a bad day I would go as far as to say barely even qualifies as gameplay in any meaningful sense playing tears of the kingdom is like playing Resident Evil 4 with an infinite rocket launcher in other words it's pointless there are no trade-offs to be made there's no challenge to be found and there's nothing interesting about it every problem you come across while exploring is solved by opening a menu and selecting the solution from a list and there's no thought involved whatsoever when you have an inventory full of hammers every problem looks like a nail so yeah wow things have really taken a negative turn haven't they some of you may be screaming at your monitor right now yelling that all this is a problem with me and not the game so allow me to calmly and rationally tell you why I'm right and you're wrong let's look at the Skyview tower on Mount laneru in the east of the map sitting right at the peak of the mountain it's quite intimidating from a distance and looks like it will require some serious effort to reach presumably with a few problems to solve and diversions to be distracted by on the way when I actually resolved to go there and activate it however all I had to do was use recall on a fallen Stone to gain some hype and then Glide over it wasn't difficult it wasn't interesting and it wasn't particularly fun yes I could have ignored this Fallen Stone and made my way to the tower the old-fashioned way but why would I bother doing that when the game freely handed me the tools to do it in a much simpler and faster way there's a wider conversation to be had here about who holds ultimate responsibility for a player's experience with the game the play themselves or the developers and that the risk of being called a Centrist I think the answer lies somewhere in the middle I go back and forth on this magnesia intuition is that the player as the one holding the controller has the final say but there are so many techniques developers can use to influence a player's behavior in unseen ways that I'm not sure it's quite so clear-cut but even if the player does have the final word I hope most would agree that it's on the developers to at the very least encourage the player to engage with their game in the most interesting ways possible so when the game drops a stone right in front of me on this mountain what do you think the developers are trying to say to me they're saying here you go use this I didn't go out of my way to find this shortcut of the mountain the game quite literally dropped it in my lap it may well have been a more interesting experience to climb the mountain myself but the game deliberately nudged me to take the boring path of least resistance why would ignore it here's one final example just to demonstrate that almost everything you enjoy about this game in the first 20 hours will come to piss you off by the end of your playthrough earlier I praised the caves with tunnels blocked by rocks because they led to interesting choices about how to clear them but as with so many other things in this game you'll eventually realize that there's an obviously dominant strategy a lot of these rocks are hiding Claymores and smaller Stones inside which are just begging to be fused together for a makeshift and essentially free rock breaker once you've realized this you can go ahead and use the same boring solution almost every time you come across one of these tunnels while you do always have the option of luring an enemy to break them for you or using a Zone eye Cannon or probably a bunch of other options that never even crossed my mind there's no reason to experiment with any of this where you can fall back on such an obvious and simple solution and I wish the game forced me to improvise and get more creative now you might be thinking okay but how would you design different improvised solutions that remained interesting over the dozens of caves that are in the game and my reply to that is don't make the player do the same thing dozens of times if Nintendo wants to add another cave but can't think of anything unique to put in it they should do us all a favor and leave it on The Cutting Room floor the caves are yet another feature that could have been cut in half with nothing of real value being lost I think I've more than made my point by now about the disappointing exploration in this game so I won't go on too much longer but to summarize tears of the Kingdom gives the player so much freedom and gives them ubiquitous access to so many overpowered tools that any semblance of challenge or Intrigue is completely Stripped Away instead of engaging with the world and solving problems dynamically you can just select ready-made solutions from a menu and while this may be interesting the first time it's boring by the 10th a major part of the problem here is that the game is too big it's just way too big and it really outstays its welcome I'd say there are around 30 hours or so of worthwhile content the majority of which is found by following the main quests the remaining 90 hours of my playthrough were made up of repetitive shrines korak puzzles enemy camps exploring caves activating light roots in the depths once you've seen a handful of these you've seen them all and doing them again and again only makes it more likely that you'll grow tired of solving the same problems with the same Solutions with all of these things being largely optional again you might say that this is my fault and not the games I could have ended my playthrough at any point by heading for the Finish Line after all but while I was comfortable leaving side quests unfinished and koroks undiscovered I felt compelled to complete every Shrine and activate every light route before I was happy going for the ending as long as there was a slight possibility that I might be missing something unique or interesting I wasn't ready to call it quits sadly it was extremely rare that I actually did run into something unique or interesting and by the time the credits rolled I found myself feeling that my 120 hours with the game had one digit too many another word for optional would be skippable and that's exactly how a lot of the content and tears of the Kingdom feels I could easily have skipped three quarters of this game and had roughly the same experience a better experience in fact because it would have had less filler my feelings on this are similar to how I felt about Elden rink when ninety percent of the content in a game is optional does that mean it gets a free pass to reuse ideas over and over again I'd argue not but the developers are both Nintendo and fromsoft don't seem to agree with me this kind of repetition has become one of my most hated parts of recent game design for a counter example Shadow of the Colossus is a game that has next to no repetition It's relatively short and sweet at least compared to the Behemoth length of many modern games and almost every minute you spend with it is spent doing something new imagine if you had to fight the same group of small enemies every time you reached a new area in that game and I think you'll see how that kind of repetition just detracts from the core of the experience okay it really is time to move on now I know I haven't been especially complimentary about tears of the Kingdom so far and fair warning that's going to continue but there is good mixed in with the bat and nowhere is that more evident than in the topic of the next section shrines and temples buckle up here's a quick rundown of how shrines work in this game dotted all over Hyrule and across the sky islands are these big shiny shiny rocks Each of which will transport you via a loading screen into a little self-contained area where the goal is to reach the statue at the end to get a spirit orb four of which can be exchanged Elsewhere for an extra heart piece or a bigger stamina wheel some shrines contain combat challenges some contain puzzles some contain patronizing tutorials for features you've probably been interacting with for dozens of hours already and some contain nothing but a platform floating in space with your reward just waiting for you at the other end you still have to sit through two loading screens for these ones by the way as for discovering and accessing these shrines from the open world they can most commonly be found sitting on the surface and are often visible from long distances making them frequent targets of the manual map marking feature since you can immediately teleport back to any Shrine that's been activated these easy to reach ones are usually placed near settlements or stables for ease of travel other shrines might require you to complete some side quests or puzzle in the Overworld to make them appear like casting a shadow of a certain shape or being a minibus these more involved Shrine Discovery tasks are often the ones that lead to empty rooms inside presumably made up for in Nintendo's mind that whatever you had to do outside to make the shrine appear sometimes this is fair enough sometimes it really isn't as for the quality of the contents of shrines in general you should already know that my opinion is largely negative the vast majority of them are too short too easy too repetitive and just an all-round waste of time there are now even more of them than in the last game too which is hard to say it's a good thing given their dubious gameplay value maybe you think I'm being harsh by beginning this section with such a dismissive criticism but by Leading with my strongest evidence I hope I can convince you that yes the shrines really are that bad remember that bit in the games tutorial where you construct a raft to cross a body of water there were multiple shrines that shamelessly reused that scenario almost exactly I couldn't believe it the first time I saw this by the fourth time I got used to the disappointment and repetition and wasn't surprised anymore puzzle shrines that don't just rely on recycling ideas from the tutorial almost invariably suffer from a different problem they're way too simple they almost never required you to use more than one ability and the average number of puzzles in each Shrine is two which is just a pitifully small number the first will usually introduce a puzzle concept while the second if there is a second will offer a slight Twist on that concept bang you're done here's one where you need to build a ramp to launch a rolling ball towards a hole then do it again at a slightly greater distance I spent longer waiting for the ball to get into the hole than I did actually solving this here's one where you attach a ball to a wheel then pick it up again and put it in the hole that's it that's the whole shrine here's one that asks you to hit a switch and Rewind a ball that's it that's the whole Shrine here's one where you have to align the segments of this Tower and then Ascend to the top that's it that's really the whole Shrine it's truly astonishing to me that Nintendo considered this one acceptable there are quite literally dozens of examples of time wasting nothing shrines I could pull from here but to illustrate just how poor the general level of quality is all I need to say is that I grew so used to each Shrine having only one or two puzzles that it was a genuine shock when I came across one with more than three although in order to complement this Shrine I would have to ignore the fact that it's really the same puzzle repeated multiple times so this is faint praise as for the combat training shrines I don't think much explanation is needed on why it feels insulting to discover one of these and be trained on something you've already been doing for 60 hours archery training seriously who is this for if this really is supposed to be a tutorial why the hell would you put it somewhere the player might not find it for dozens of hours if they even find it at all the unskippable dialogue that takes place beforehand is just an additional affront to my patients and while I'm on the subject why do I have to skip through three yes three separate cutscenes or dialogue boxes every time I complete a shrine there isn't a single person playing this game who wants to watch this play out more than once but Nintendo doesn't care now look it's not all bad there are occasionally shrines that have some interesting ideas that are worth seeing and I'll show a few examples of them in a moment but this brings me back to the same complaints I've been making throughout this video The Game's massive size works against it here once again because that size is what necessitates so much filler to repeat you could cut three quarters of this game out entirely and it would only improve the experience of the 152 shrines in the game when you know that some are actually worth your time let's be generous and say 20 then you're still incentivized to try and see them all on the off chance that the next one you find will be one of the 30 or so good ones using our figure of 20 that means the game has managed to keep you playing 10 hours for every two hours of actually worthwhile content this is shamefully exploitative design that shows absolutely zero respect for the Player's time and I hate it I [ __ ] hate it the longer I spend thinking about this game the worse and worse my opinion of it becomes but anyway I was about to say how some of the shrines are actually good wasn't I so let's put a pin in me hating the game just for now the shrines I would consider worthwhile generally fall into two categories the first is shrines that introduce genuinely New Concepts you haven't seen before although your mileage can vary on this depending on how much you've already seen in the open world the shrine that revolves around using the stabilizer device for example was really enjoyable for me because I was discovering and teaching myself the rules of a new tool as I went through it if I had already come across stabilizers in the open world and become familiar with them before finding this Shrine I have no doubt my opinion would have been less positive again this leads me back to one of my major criticisms of the game almost every interaction you can have with all of its different moving Parts really is enjoyable the first time around I mean that it really is enjoyable the problem is that it makes you do these interactions again and again until you're sick of them and after the first 20 hours or so of a playthrough new things to discover are spread very thinly indeed honorable mentions for other shrines with interesting ideas include ones where you have to build a contraption that will keep its balance while sliding along rails ones where you have to join together mechanical gears the one that tricks you into thinking it's an empty Shrine and then pulls The Rook I wish there were more that did this and also the Jenga one enough said I'll temper my praise for these by saying that most of them feel like introductions to concepts with room for a lot more complexity but as usual that potential for complexity is never explored in this game the second category of shrine that I think is worth your time is made up of the ones that take away your equipment and ask you to improvise a way of taking out a room full of enemies given what I said in the previous section about the value of placing restrictions on the player this will probably come as no surprise that's not to say these shrines are perfect they still have damaged sponge enemies and vehicles are still impossible to control accurately but while there may have been areas in the open world that better delivered on the promise of spontaneous problem solving using the tools and systems in front of you these shrines are the only parts of the game that I can recall that actually force you into this improvisational mode and I think they deserve some kudos for that they usually have traps that can be triggered in various ways to damage enemies and I enjoyed figuring out how to explode these for maximum effect even if I had to fall back on giving enemies a good old smack to finish them off having some unique enemies or even a mini boss in one of these shrines could have made for some interesting twists because there's definitely a lot further to go with this idea but on the whole I'm just glad the concept was explored at all for being similar to this category of shrine another honorable mention goes to some of the shrine tasks in the sky which ask you to transport a crystal from one Island to another if you are able to ignore the fact that you could spawn a flying platform at any time to instantly solve this problem then it can be enjoyable cobbling together a way of moving the crystal to where it needs to go using locally sourced materials so that's about it for shrines but there's another dungeon-like feature in the game that I might as well cover in this section the temples at the end of each map Region's main quest you'll get to an elemental temple with a companion of one of the nearby fantasy races with the goal of activating a certain number of switches to unlock access to the boss which can then be defeated to end whatever environmental Calamity it was bringing down on the region in practice these temples are sort of like extra large shrines which is why I feel Justified including them here but to their credit they do have factors that make them a bit more unique the fire temple for instance will see you building ramps to launch your Goron companion into gongs to activate the bus switches and the fact that you have control over where and when to launch him makes this problem a bit more freeform than similar ramp building puzzles encountered in shrines where balls will just spawn and Roll Along by themselves the freedom of movement you have in temples and the ability to activate switches in whatever order you like makes temples into more of a navigational challenge than shrines are and it helps that for the most part they are pretty damn big in multiple different temples you'll find yourself looking through some bars at a switch and trying to piece together in your head what the alternative route inside might be which can be a satisfying exercise the construct Factory that serves as the lead-up to the spirit temple in the depths was one of my highlights in terms of using vehicles to solve puzzles and once again the reason for this is the restrictions placed on you which require you to apply some actual thoughts to the problem you can't rely on the same old Auto builds as everywhere else because the goal down here is not to transport yourself around is to transport these Big Blocks around and you'll be attaching wheels and other powered devices to them in several different configurations to make it through the gauntlet there isn't a whole lot more to say about the temples and nothing in them is likely to blow your mind but the fact that they are on the whole so much more enjoyable than the ostensibly similar shrines reveals yet another floor at the heart of this game's design with shrines being optional and Nintendo having no guarantee that every player is going to see any given Shrine it makes sense that they would devote less resources to making each one interesting or unique but with every player being encouraged to complete the temples for story progression it's only natural that they've received a lot more work and yes it's true that temples and shrines are both technically optional for reaching the ending but any rational player would agree that shrines are more optional I think you know what I mean when I say that missing out on a quarter or even half of the shrines would be no great loss missing out on one of the temples who'd been skipping a major portion of the game's unique content I can see this leading to a kind of chicken and egg situation if the contents of shrimps were more worthwhile I might not be so dismissive of the most waste of time but if Nintendo had devoted more energy to making shrines good then they probably would have given them more prominence and made them less optional to begin with maybe a middle ground solution here could have been consolidating several shrine's worth of puzzles into one the that actually had the room to expand on a puzzle concept rather than ending after two minutes with the choice of a health or stamina upgrade at the end if these combo shrines come too close to stepping on the toes of the temples then just call them temples and have twice as many temples in the game or make the existing temples twice as big I don't see an issue with that and in fact I would prefer it to the fragmented crumbs of puzzle solving dished out by the shrines as they are now I'm hoping Nintendo sees the light and moves on from this open world formula for the next entry in the series but if they do make another game with these pitiful time wasting shrines they'll be revealing themselves as hacks of the highest order a couple of scattered thoughts about shrines before I move on for a long while the puzzles that took me the longest time to solve were the ones that required the use of ascent not because they were difficult but because for the first half of my playthrough I kept forgetting the ascent existed I'm guessing this was an issue for some playtesters too because shrines that require the use of ascent will sometimes remind you of its existence by forcing you to use it at the beginning I think the source of this problem is the very specialized use case of the ability which means it's not exactly a flexible tool for puzzle solving unlike Ultra hand or fuse which you'll almost constantly be using because they can do so many different things Ascend on the other hand is mostly used in the opened world for quickly exiting caves or very occasionally forgetting height when scaling something but in these cases you almost always have alternative and more intuitive options so it's easy to forget about it entirely and then carry that forgetfulness over into shrines finally the length and complexity of side quests or tasks that end with a shrine can vary wildly sometimes you ski down a slope and you get a shrine simple but in the strangest example I came across one side quest involves discovering three separate jiga hideouts placed all over the map to collect a eager uniform then completing another task all over Gerudo Canyon for the blade Master making offerings to these little statues and at the end of all that you get a shrine the same reward you've already found dozens of times over just sitting there in the open world it's bizarre okay that really is it for shrines now next on The Chopping Block combat [Music] [Music] when it comes to combat I can more or less stick to the theme of all my other criticisms of the game so far that is almost every interaction you can have with the combat system presents an enjoyable and interesting problem to solve the first time you encounter it experimenting to figure out the weakness of an enemy on the Fly and then exploding that weakness to take them down can be incredibly satisfying the first time around like solving an open-ended puzzle with one of the most diverse tool sets in all of gaming the second time armed with knowledge from your previous encounter will be less interesting the third even less and by the fourth it's no longer worth your time to engage with it just imagine a puzzle game that made you solve the same puzzle over and over again it's immediately obvious how boring that would be to play but that's exactly how it feels to fight the same enemy groups mini bosses and even actual bosses repeatedly in tears of the Kingdom so yeah again I'm coming straight out the gate firing negativity on all cylinders but there is a hell of a lot of potential in the combat system here and flashes of Brilliance that showed that Nintendo is more than capable of drawing out that potential to my mind the fact that I ended the game so bored of the combat is simply more evident that the game is way too big and that repetitive filler content never adds to against value it only subtracts from it so let's get into how exactly the combat works if you've played breath of the wild then a very large proportion of it will already be familiar to you from weapon move sets to enemy types and minibuses to the divisive weapon durability system but an attempt has been made to add new stuff too most notably an enemy variety and in the additional properties that certain weapons can carry let's start with the options on the player's side there are three weapon types one-handers for quick strikes two handers for slow and Broad attacks and Spears for long range pokes if you're so inclined you can include bows as a fourth weapon type but they belong in a different category in my opinion weapons can have different properties like doing more damage near water or increasing the damage of sneak attacks and their damage values can also be augmented by fusing monster horns or other materials to them more on that shortly on top of that weapons can either be blunt or sharp which makes them more or less suited to different tasks like breaking rocks and armor or cutting through trees and Vines you have a certain number of weapon slots Shield slots and bow slots for carrying these different weapon options around with the chance to expand these slots coming as a reward for completing mindless 5 Second puzzles I mean collecting korac seeds by the time you reach the end of a playthrough you're likely to have an absurd number of weapons that take a truly ludicrous amount of time to scroll through when trying to switch between them which the game encourages you to do often by making different ones more effective in different scenarios just like changing clothing this is another feature that adds a Monumental amount of menu usage to the game and I think it could have benefited greatly here from restricting the player a bit more if you ask me and by watching this video you are asking me the less men you use the better and my own potentially extreme opinion is that limiting the player to exactly one weapon one bow and one Shield carried at a time with no inventory whatsoever would make for far more compelling gameplay as you would have to constantly be weighing up damage values durability and additional properties to make trade-offs every time you swapped your weapon for a new one I know the durability mechanic was a controversial inclusion in the last game but I actually really like it in theory because it turns every weapon swing into a choice with tangible consequences without those consequences combat would become even more dull than it is now and actions like breaking rocks in caves would cease to involve any interesting decisions sadly once you reach a certain point the desire to avoid those draining consequences will play a big role in encouraging you to avoid combat altogether but I'll get to that in a bit anyway while you do have access to a small Army's worth of killing implements at any given time there's a more interesting tool that can be used against groups of enemies the environment itself if you're in a patch of dry grass you can start a fire to burn several at once and even destroy any wooden weapons then catch the updraft to rain arrows on them from above if you're near a river or lake you just need to knock an enemy into it to send them to an instant watery grave being near water will also make electric arrows more effective which can cause enemies to drop their weapons while being shocked a lot of enemy camps will have explosive barrels littered about and the urge to throw shoot or otherwise combust them is impossible to ignore at the beginning of a playthrough stealth is also an option as is gliding down to an enemy camp from above picking off the centuries and getting the drop on snoozing baddies before they know what hit them as you'd no doubt guess by now I found these environmental interactions to be where the combat could be at its most interesting thanks to the improvised strategies they encourage however I have to take the window of that Praise by saying that as usual just because these strategies are possible doesn't mean they're optimal and by the time you've worked out of the most reliable way to take down a damaged spongy enemy is to stun lock them with a big sword and grind their health down you're not likely to wheel out these kind of interesting tactics very often again if you weren't allowed and encouraged to keep an inventory full of powerful weapons capable of doing this at all times there might be a reason to come up with a more creative way to dispatch these enemies as it is now there isn't moving on to defensive options these include raising a shield sprinting out of the way or jump dodging which can lead to a flurry rush counter-attack if the gods of RNG deem you worthy of their favor I've played this game for over 120 hours and I still have no idea how flurry Rush works and can't trigger it consistently if you've played this game or the previous one for any length of time then you should know exactly what I'm talking about no matter how perfectly you appear to have dodged an attack it just doesn't happen when you expect it to it's so inconsistent that I'd honestly be surprised if even the developers were able to execute it three times in a row it's impossible for me to say whether this is intentionally inconsistent or a glitch or yes a skill issue so I won't Linger on it too long but suffice to say that it doesn't feel good to play with a mechanic that is so seemingly random even if it did work consistently I have to say that it's not an especially interesting mechanic because once activated there's only a single possible response hammering the attack button it's not exactly deep gameplay Ganondorf squeezes out his own McFlurry to use against you in the final battle and it would have made for a really surprising and satisfying turn to tables moment if you could reliably do the same back to him but of course you can't and it just feels clunky and awkward as a result as it happens it won't set you back too much if you mess up a Dodge and in fact avoiding attacks isn't that important to begin with because you can easily pause the game at any time and heal your way out of any trouble instantly the number of hearts in the corner of the screen is practically irrelevant because you actually have hundreds of hearts at your fingertips immediately accessible only a menu away you'll be pausing to heal like this especially often during the early game when one or two hits are still enough to kill you you can't die from a single hit if you're at full health so an enemy attack that would have killed you just leaves you with a quarter of a heart and you basically have no choice but to pause and heal back up to full just stop and think for a second what that really means every single time you make a mistake and take damage you have to pause the game navigate through a bloated menu of potentially more than a hundred items and decide what you're gonna eat to get that Health back it's mind-boggling to me that Nintendo was happy enough with this system to use it for two games in a row just quickly while I'm on the subject there's a class of weapon that does extra damage if you use it when you're at one heart or less so there's a mechanical incentive to stay at low health and make use of that bonus if you have a weapon that carries it but because link flashes red and this annoying pinging noise plays when your health is low the option isn't worth thinking about and you might as well just heal up this feels like careless design similarly the companion avatars you get at the end of each Temple only get in the way and cluttered the screen so I immediately turned them off the second I was able to and never made use of the options they provided these avatars are a step backwards from the companion abilities in the previous game if you ask me in the depths you can experiment with using vehicles in combat and as you can imagine there are a lot of options in play here you can attach lasers cannons flamethrowers spikes and more to any vehicle which seems at first like an amazing array of choices but the thing is you never really have enough control over vehicles to reliably use them in combat cannons will fire at set intervals with no way to influence their fire rate or aim outside of moving the entire vehicle you can attach a steering stick to vehicles that is pretty much mandatory if you want to have any control over them at all but it doesn't come with a fire button for attached weapons and I really don't understand this because it seems so obvious with control out of your hands and the odds stacked so thoroughly against you it does at least feel good to pull off a successful attack of the vehicle but the mechanics are so unwieldy and the alternative so much quicker and easier that it's just not worth the time or effort even at these yigal posts would seem to be crying out for you to engage in vehicular combat it comes back to the same problem as always I could go toward the effort of constructing a raft and outmaneuvering the yiga captain or I could just jump up and headshot him in two seconds guess which method I defaulted to over time why bother spending my time designing a monster killing Rube Goldberg machine when I can just shoot them with an arrow or stun lock them with a big sword you might be tempted once more to say that this is a problem with me not with the game surely it's on me if I consciously choose to go with a boring safe option over a more interesting one well perhaps needless to say I don't think so part of the role of a game's designer is to encourage players to interact with it in the most interesting ways possible and sometimes that means putting in obstacles to prevent the most boring and safe solutions from being viable if the yika captains were protected from Easy headshots by a force field or something that required the use of a zonai device to break through then I would have a reason to get creative with the vehicle or some other Contraption in other words I would have an actual problem to solve but they're not and I don't so an easy headshot will do the trick just fine given that this simple solution also uses far less resources than an elaborate Contraption why wouldn't I just do that every time even if Vehicles were more viable and easier to control you're still severely limited on what you can achieve with them by your battery capacity another resource you'll be slowly expanding throughout your playthrough on top of that Vehicles will actually despawn after a certain amount of use meaning they're rarely worth investing any time in yes I know I've been advocating for more restrictions on the player throughout this video and I do think there's some restrictions on vehicles is sensible but the whole battery thing seems a bit too punishing to me and it strongly discourages experimentation particularly early on it's also especially annoying that enemies vehicles are under no such restrictions perhaps a better way to offer progression in vehicle building across a playthrough would be by limiting how many Zona devices can be attached to a single Contraption with the possibility of increasing that number with upgrades just like how the battery can be upgraded now even if it didn't make Vehicles more useful it would at least make experimenting with them less painful and the creative people who enjoy pushing the building system to its limits would probably be grateful for the change okay so that about covers the player's options in combat I'll move on to the enemies side now starting with the standard enemy camps dotted around the Overworld under depths these are usually populated by a mix of little berkoblins bigger moblins sneering glasalphos and new to the sequel these flying error Kudos in combination they can offer some surprising interactions like a moblin without a weapon hurling one of his smaller colleagues at you or an error Kuda grabbing an Archer and flying them around as a moving century they may not provide much of a challenge when fought in isolation but these minor enemies are nevertheless capable of a surprisingly complex range of behaviors they sleep at night they ride horses and carts they look for food to eat they grab new weapons when there's a lost and they can even strafe when running towards you to avoid getting an arrow to the face the boss perkoblin is a new enemy with a lot of personality and I do like the way they lounge around when not in combat the hoverblins and like-like Seed in caves the robotic constructs lingering are the sky islands and the gibto Monsters infesting the desert all appear to add some much needed variety but however impressive the diversity of enemies and their Dynamic behaviors may be none of this changes the fact that they can all be taken down with the same strategy as soon as you've got them stunned once which is usually as easy as getting a single headshot with a bow putting them in a stun log cycle means it's already over the omnipotence of this tactic means that the only question you really need to answer when taking on regular enemies is which weapons durability want to drain to do so this question is nowhere near interesting enough to sustain a playthrough of over a hundred hours I don't want to come across as ungrateful here tears of the Kingdom adds quite a lot of new enemy types actually more than I was expecting to see but making me fight dozens if not hundreds of them over a playthrough letting me getting completely burned out on them and in the end it still had me crying out for something new that never came I repeat that if the game in this world was smaller then there would have been less repetition and this would have been far less likely to happen the only standard enemy type that consistently got a reaction out of me during my playthrough was the gloomy re-dead hand things that chase you relentlessly and continually respawn running away from them consistently felt tense like I'd avoided a real danger but I think the biggest reason for that may just be because that the enemy type I encountered the least so I didn't get a chance to become bored of them if that is the case then it says a lot about how the massive size and repetitiveness of this game works against it in the end the other group of enemies are the bosses and minibuses which are automatically more interesting to fight than the standard groups both because they're more rare and because they can't be stun locked meaning they require more attention and strategizing to defeat linos present a very traditional kind of colon response boss fight where they cycle through a series of moves and you need to deploy the appropriate response to each one until you win there's nothing wrong with this of course but it does mean that by the time you defeat your first one you've already formulated a reply to each of its moves when you come across a second Lino later what additional value are you really going to get from fighting the same boss again I felt the same way about the fruxes founded the depths which are disappointingly the only enemy tab unique to that area discovering and beating my first one was a fresh challenge that I enjoyed coming across it in the mid game when fresh challenges were rare but beating my second one revealed that it was the exact same challenge again I ignored the third one I saw the first time I saw a stone Talus burst out of the ground bristling with the goblins it was a genuine surprise to me and it had my jaw on the floor but of course I was never surprised by it again and eventually was more likely to be annoyed by the sight of one in my path than excited my time with the flux construct minibuses offers the starkist example of how too much repetition can start to subtract from your experience playing my first fight against one of these was a long and painful ordeal as I slowly whittled down its Health with the occasional lucky shot on its moving weak spot on my second or third encounter something clicked and I realized that I could use ultra hand to literally tear the boss to Pieces an incredible Revelation that allowed me to turn the tables and make short work of a boss that had previously given me a bit of trouble even though this technique made the boss fight quite easy I didn't care because it was something I figured out for myself without being told by the game and it felt hard earned after repeating this tactic over many successive fights against the same boss however it turned from a fun Discovery to a boring slog and I have a hard time believing that Nintendo thinks anyone will find this interesting enough to want to do it 20 times over a playthrough on a long enough time scale everything fun in this game eventually morphs into filler my favorite mini bosses in concept are the hinoxes because it feels like they're actually reacting to what you do during a fight rather than being totally one-sided as in the Lionel accounters you'll realize quickly that hinoxes have a glaring weakness in the middle of their face and if you Bing them in the eye hole they'll go down and allow some free hits sounds a bit too easily exploitable doesn't it and it would be if not for the fact that they'll cover their eyes with their hands to prevent this from happening a second time I can't overstate what a mind-blowing thing this is the first time you see it because it just makes so much sense and yet I can't recall seeing any good examples of it in other games wouldn't you want to cover your weak spot in just the same way if you knew your enemy was planning to exploit it unfortunately the first time you saw this was actually six years ago in the previous game so it doesn't have quite the same impact today bosses performing logical responses to prevent dominant strategies like this is such an amazingly compelling idea and yet disappointingly it doesn't appear anywhere else in the game except arguably in the final boss and I really can't understand why that is surely Nintendo should have been able to come up with some new avenues for this idea in the six years between games another excellent feature of hinox fights is the fact that you can grab weapons from their necklace mid-battle it means that the encounter itself is providing you with the materials you need to beat it and by now it should go without saying that I believe this game is at its best when that is the case it's largely unnecessary because you almost certainly have an entire Armory in your pocket already but I appreciate the idea and see it as further evidence for my theory that having no inventory could improve the game as grabbing these weapons mid-combat would have been actually useful finally behaviors like picking up trees to use as clubs or the stanox variant doing their best Marilyn Manson impression a really nice touches that can make these fights feel even more dynamic sadly most of my encounters with hinoxes didn't showcase even half of this potential complexity because you always come across them sleeping you can usually get in enough early hits to burst down a massive chunk of their health and make the whole thing into a cakewalk that's overruled too soon rounding out the bosses are the once encountered during the main quest at the end of each Temple and I think it's fair to say they're focused on spectacle over challenge or depth there's nothing at all wrong with the boss fight being easy if it's done well and succeeds at creating the spectacle is trying to not every game has to demand a high level of Mastery to beat it but when a boss is so easy that it feels anticlimactic and you don't even get to experience it properly before it's over I think most would agree that's a problem calgaria boss that serves as the climax of The Wind Temple presents just such a problem the music that plays during this boss fight is a heart-swelling rendition of the Rito theme that hits like a Nostalgia truck full of Tamagotchis and beanie babies but I beat the boss so quickly that I didn't get to hear the bit that goes like this [Music] which is arguably among the most important elements of this spectacle and is of infinitely more interest to me than this lukewarm boss fight adding insult to injury is the fact that even these main storybotses are not considered sacred enough to be spared from the content Mill and when I first came across another Caldera in the depths I shook my head in disbelief yes there's more than one down here bye then what I'll give these Colgate rematches a free pass because this is how I found out about the Boss music I'd missed out on the first time but the rematch against the water tempo boss gets no such luck this really is a shockingly barefaced attempt at padding out the game just imagine for a second if you had to fight every boss from Ocarina of Time multiple times over a playthrough it's completely Unthinkable we're using content like this wasn't considered acceptable in 1998 and yet pretty much every big budget open world game is doing just that 25 years later older Zelda games were obviously more linear and so the developers had tighter control over the pacing which meant the bosses deliberately placed at the end of a dungeon or Gauntlet generally served to create a climactic encounter with a moveset or weakness usually tailored to force you into using Whatever item you've most recently acquired I'm actually not a big fan of this design that obliges you to use one specific strategy against a boss but will gloss over that whether you liked a particular boss or not at least you could say that they all had a uniqueness to them and they all served a wider role in terms of the game's pacing and structure if you had to fight them multiple times throughout the game it would cheapen the experience in every way ah but that's just the thing isn't it you don't have to beat 10 flux constructs or 10 hinoxes in fact you don't even have to be one they're all optional so what right do I have to complain about their abundant inclusion well for me this comes back yet again to the game being way too big and I have to commit the faux pas of answering a question with a question what's the point what's the point of having this huge open world if the only way to fill it is by copying and pasting the same [ __ ] all over the place the conclusion I'm drawn to is that the point is for Nintendo to waste as much of your time as possible in the disconcerting belief that the longer runtime somehow makes the game better and as I said in the previous section I [ __ ] hate this I hate it so much now there is a less cynical answer to the question of repeated content and it's only fair I lay that out here too while I stand by my claim that the intrinsic gameplay value of fighting the same bosses over and over again is dubious there is an extrinsic reward that comes from beating enemies and bosses in the form of the resources and materials they drop so the game does give you an incentive to grit your teeth and take on your 10th hinox if you want the horn off its head these materials can be fused to weapons to increase their damage output and improve their durability and it was a few hours into my playthrough that the full implications of this clicked into place after I beat my first minibus and it dropped a stone heart that could be attached to a weapon simply put the stronger the enemy the stronger the materials they drop on death So in theory the more effort you put in the more rewards you get out of an enemy encounter this creates quite an effective feedback loop at the beginning of the game as new classes of enemy are being intermittently introduced from normal to Blue to Black to silver with a jump in health and damage and in the strength of their materials at each level these stronger enemies have the same move sets as weaker ones and don't present any new mechanical challenge I'd actually say it's less fun fighting silver enemies because they're damaged sponges but it's still worth engaging with them to get your hands on the new resources they provide and increase your own damage potential this resource curve is effective at making you want to engage with combat for a time until you reach the top of that curve and have fused weapons from the highest tier of enemy that are about as powerful as they're ever gonna get as soon as you reach that point your motivations around combat will completely flip and it becomes in your interest to avoid it so as not to waste your weapons durability on pointless encounters if you already have weapons of the highest tier then there are two outcomes that can result from using up their durability on enemy camps you either get resources back that will allow you to craft the same weapons again meaning you effectively neither lose nor gain anything or you don't get back enough resources to replenish the weapons you expended on clearing the camp in which case you've actually lost out both of these potential results are pretty much a waste of your time so combat is best avoided once you reach this point this goes beyond just avoiding enemy camps and minibuses which can clearly be seen in the distance and are easy to go around when traveling at night you'll sometimes be ambushed by stealthos and even then it's just not worth the time effort or resources it will take to fight them and my usual response was to just ignore them and keep running and bear in mind that right now I'm speaking purely in terms of extrinsic reward driven motivation in terms of the intrinsic enjoyment you might get from fighting the same enemies over and over again that will have dried up long before you got to this point my reaction to seeing an enemy camp over a minibus on the horizon went through three phases during my playthrough at the very beginning when everything still felt new I would engage with every enemy camp I came across partly for the extrinsic reward of collecting resources from them and partly just for the intrinsic enjoyment of engaging with the combat system once I'd be in a certain number of enemy encounters and come to understand the limits of the combat system these battles were no longer intrinsically satisfying and in fact they were kind of boring so I avoided enemy camps unless I could see that there was a treasure chest or a new enemy type to collect a new resource from the same reason I continued fighting minibuses that I encountered because their Rarity compared to standard enemies meant that it took longer for me to get burned out on them and made the resources they dropped more precious too and also because ironically many of them are actually easier to kill than standard groups eventually however I started just avoiding enemy camps and even minibuses because I was bored of having the same fights over and over again and I didn't want to eat into my resources for no reason I reached this third phase where combat was neither intrinsically nor extrinsically satisfying shockingly early into my playthrough which goes to show just what a big problem the endless repetition of content can be yet again this is another problem that would have been far less egregious if the game was smaller and shorter and if a smaller scope also freed up some development bandwidth to add a bit more enemy variety that surely couldn't hurt either to summarize my thoughts on combat It suffers from the same issues as the other parts of the game I've mentioned it has a lot of potential in terms of complexity with so many possible interactions between the player enemies and the environment that it feels Limitless and yet just like the shrines in practice combat is repetitive to the point of becoming boring just like the open world exploration it gives you easy access to an abundance of overpowered tools that can trivialize each encounter by allowing you to use the same strategy every single time the only difference is that while I was still driven to find every Shrine and explore every area just in case the next place contains something unique when it came to combat I learned early on that that was never going to be the case and began to purposefully avoid it by the end of course I was disappointed by all of these parts of the game but at the very least in the case of combat I was able to ignore it without feeling like I might potentially be missing out which is not exactly a glubbing compliment for one of the main features in the game as I move into the conclusion of this video though I think potential is the key word when it comes to this game and I want to wrap things up with some thoughts about what could have been instead [Music] one of the goals of modern game design is to create an immersive engrossing experience that feels real and makes the player forget they're holding a controller there are two alternative approaches to the big name Studios of today are taking to get to that point on the one hand some studios are leaning harder and harder into graphical Fidelity in an attempt to get their Creations looking as close to reality as possible while this can be impressive for the first few years after release something more realistic looking will always come along eventually and I guarantee that in two decades time kids will be complaining about the graphics in old games of the 2010s and 20s this is without mentioning that making a game with a photorealistic style is incredibly expensive there are plenty of examples of games that focused on realistic Graphics to the detriment of other elements of design and I have no doubt that there will be many more in the future the alternative route to immersion taken by Nintendo with the two newest Zelda games however is to create a virtual world with so much complexity and so many interconnected systems that it starts to feel like an approximation of reality even if the visual element is made up of simple textures and a small number of polygons in a kind of digital oppressionism in this way breath of the wild and now its sequel tears of the kingdom are almost following in the footsteps of the immersive Sim genre I know that my opinion on this game has come across as overwhelmingly negative in this video and that's because my opinion is largely negative but believe it or not I'm not usually in the habit of spending over 100 hours doing something I think is a complete waste of time the reason I spent so long playing this game is because it has an incredible amount of potential I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that this game has what may be the most fertile ground I have ever seen in terms of the interconnected systemic potential of a virtual world all the ingredients are here for this to be something very very special and yet the game does absolutely nothing with this potential Shrine puzzles are Beyond worthless combat is simultaneously way too easy but way too punishing and that's if you're not ignoring it entirely because you've realized how pointless it is every interaction you can have with this game involves menu after menu after menu and any problem you run into in the open world can be overcome by using the same tricks over and over again or you can just ignore it entirely it doesn't matter what you do I respect the incredible ambition and potential on display here but I can only hate the game for squandering it completely the way I see it there are two main culprits preventing this game from living up to that potential it's over ambitious size and its overgrown inventory the inventory problem is a mechanical one even putting the excessive menu usage to one side for a moment the inventory allows you to have a pocket full of ready-made Solutions you can deploy whenever you like and because of this it's not possible for the game to present an interesting challenge in the Overworld when you already know the answer to a problem then the actual Act of Performing that answer is nothing but a chore and by the tenth time it's a largely pointless exercise the joy is in the solving of the problem and you'll have most of this game solved so to speak after 20 hours of play the complexity of the situations you might find yourself in doesn't vary much and in fact the game rarely gets any more complicated than what you see in the tutorial the main quests in each region were enjoyable specifically because they introduced new problems for me to solve almost everything outside of them was fluff which leads me back to the game's other major issue its size Nintendo seems to have focused on quantity over quality with tears of the Kingdom which is a decision that should ring alarm bells for anyone who values their limited time of this earth when your game is so big that you need to fill it by repeating the same content in multiple spots around the map surely that's the first sign that you should downsize I do like the open world angle and I think there's a lot to be gained from allowing players to take a less linear path through a game but and it pains me that this even needs pointing out quality needs to be the focus over quantity and that goes not just for Nintendo but for all designers of opened World Games repeat anything enough times and it will eventually become routine filler that starts to subtract more than it adds I'm not so naive as to say that these flaws could be fixed with some simple changes because game development is a complicated beast but in the spirit of the minimalist design of Shadow of the Colossus I think that really considering what the core of new Zelda is about could help Nintendo subtract some of the fluff from the experience and improve things immensely for me that core is about using open-ended tools to solve interesting problems and both the inventory and the repetition necessitated by the massive world are detracting from that core eliminating both would go a long way to refocusing the game on what really makes it work in my humble opinion he says at the end of a 90 minute YouTube video this may come down to personal preference but I think a shorter experience that leaves people wanting more is always preferable to a slog that leaves them burned out and I really can't overstate just how much the phrase burned out applies to me after reaching the end of Tears of the Kingdom honestly now that I've finished it not only do I never want to touch it again I think I'm done with massive opened World Games in general I already had my doubts after Eldon ring but this game was the final nail in the coffin for me my opinion on it actually began quite positively but got more and more negative as my playthrough wore inexorably on and more and more of my time was wasted on repeating the same pointless [ __ ] say what you want about the older Zelda games but for all their flaws and formulaicness at least they get to the point long tutorials notwithstanding and can be replayed and enjoyed multiple times for what each one is trying to do in tears of the Kingdom the case for repeat playthroughs is a lot harder to make and that's before considering how much it reuses from its predecessor for players decades in the future looking back and checking out the Zelda series the idea of playing two massive open world games that use the same map back to back just doesn't bear thinking about tears of the Kingdom ticks all the right boxes to get perfect scores and rave reviews in 2023 but something tells me that after a few years have passed opinions on it will start to sour hopefully that happens in time for Nintendo to learn some lessons for the next installment

Channel: Erumore

Views: 85,599

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Id: x6pVndGl5NY

Length: 88min 43sec (5323 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 03 2023