Zelda Tears of the Kingdom Review - No Need for a Punchline

amazing games are the perplexing exciting delightful byproduct of a road construction crew at night hiding behind the scenes and working in places in ways where hopefully the result is the only thing you will ever see there might be a bug and the smell of new asphalt here and there but hopefully it's just not soft there are few games to probably be counted maybe on one hand with only four fingers up that let you feel so much the reaction against action and the push and pull interaction between player and world as the Zelda games and in particular tears of the Kingdom it's that the consistent surprise of Discovery practically never goes away until you're done with the game as always if you like the video subscribe bread the word of the channel you're going to see more reviews coming up here as well as some more videos on Zelda I'm going to keep this very low on spoilers because if there's any game in the world that actually wears its story on its very moment-to-moment gameplay it's Zelda now each action seems to build upon another magical feeling of action and experimentation in this game right from the start like a loincloth wearing Nikola Tesla in a lab of floating islands with you poking and prodding rocks and bushes walls Boulders and enemies to see how they interact Zelda opens up with a link in the princess delving deep into a cavern awaking an evil that sets out into the kingdom with a massive cutscene that sets the world into its current and pretty much ruined form and then the world opens up to you maybe even more so than breath of the wild right from the start a story that I liked but kingdom is stretched out with you outfitted with a new Gauntlet that channels magical powers that you need to use now to find the princess exploring this vast world is a tangible moment of being a kid exploring the Backwoods or going places you shouldn't those times the bad ideas are forged from using the heated desire to explore just a little bit more and stick your neck out another encounter Forge is a game like few others ever have one soaring moment to another like a child indulged in a night of Storytelling that they go to sleep and find becomes real for a moment let's discuss the verticality that exists in Zelda from the chasms you investigate watching consistently out for the Gloom to the Overland itself stretching in front of you consistently tantalizing to the actual sky islands themselves above you other than the machines of all kinds that overlay the land and makes the game quite easy to get from point to point and place to place if you need to not quickly and not without a little bit of trudging it's probably the best integration of various worlds and travel means that you could get right now on a system and even though tears of the Kingdom relaxes at times and does demonstrate more traditional open world mechanics like Towers to unlock information about the landscape it's just obfuscated enough to allow you to do it without feeling like it's dreary with each character you meet and challenge you face you learn more about the world and what's happened after this evil gets out and while it is to an extent somewhat reminiscent of an open Golden path with the expected ways to encounter some elements and upgrades certainly optimized you don't have to do do that if you don't want if you do you're going to uncover items to protect you from the cold fire electricity and more pretty much when you need them you're going to learn about creating Vehicles traps and other means of exploration pretty much when you will use them hang gliders making balloons the world opens up in a way that almost no other open world game does or pales in comparison at least due to that verticality which is heightened by the ability to at will between Heights experiment with ways of getting up and down there is something about tears of the Kingdom that feels 100 unique in the space the ability to merge any item in the game world is something talked about quite often it creates a feeling that's hard to Define and even harder to find a problem with the ability to merge lets you grab multiple items and put them together attaching a rock to a stick makes it not only hit harder but makes the stick more of an adequate weapon in a pinch and you haven't seen a cracked rock that that sucker cannot bust through another concoction is arrows you can change the way that they work by adding Wings to them making sure that that air Arrow's length of flight is even longer the entire way the game plays is surprising but almost irresistibly interesting just to give you some examples I've engaged in the way of playing this game in ways that I'm absolutely sure have not been replicated by others and this is a game that never says no it just says yes with caveats it says go ahead and try from tossing everything you carry and the heads and bodies and feet of enemies just to see what happens to fusing random things together to also see what happens to using one skill after the other for example merging a bunch of items watching it roll down a hill and then reversing it so that the enemies that are coming over the hill get hit by it while you're in a completely different spot also combat continues to be a bit of the Sticky Wicket of Zelda Zelda is one of the most optimistically designed immersive experiences that you're gonna ever play even if that means for the most part you're facing down enemies whose brains seem fuse to the very rocks you smash them with the Enemy AI is barely that usually running towards you in their version of Breakneck Pace while you switch out breaking weapons and attach items to arrows weapons Shields and others to add element or special effects now dodging and blocking is done by holding down the block button and you can also Shield bash enemies and if you parry perfectly you can leap in for a quick attack make no mistakes though the combat in Zelda isn't the atypical combat we see in a lot of other games with open world environments where skills and combos are added onto well more skills and combos making the character themselves more dangerous here for the most part health and stamina are the bread and butter with both added to you as you take on Temple challenges and get armor upgrades or make recipes and foods and better weapons and the weapons continue to have the graham cracker stability consistently threatening to make your sword stick ax or otherwise crumble against even the smallest series of hits it is what it is and if you didn't like it in the original it's gonna be here but no real difference swinging swords in the basic combos takes out single and group enemies they get more and more unusual as you continue to progress deep into the kingdom or deep into the land itself finding better basic weapons and making your own weapons does allow for for you to take down the bosses that you find throughout the game world and I'll have you tear us in through the landscape on a wagon but here instead of just being made of wood it's made of wood and rock and blocks and magic and just a little bit of Hope every interaction is that kind of trade-off between experimentation and demonstration do you experiment in the thick a battle or do you demonstrate that you've learned the various ways to attack and take out enemies knowing their weaknesses strapping rocks onto swords to break walls that you can pull enemies down into them is just that one moment as well as swinging a two-handed sword taking out everyone in a single swing around you because you put them all in a wooden box that you've dropped from the ceiling I fought off a group of enemies by making a trap fusing items into a makeshift Corner then running out and rolled a rock down into the opening it didn't work it didn't hurt them enough and I died from an errant hit so I tried it again this time instead setting it up so I could just close off the walls into a box enemies stuck inside and then smash them all from above let's just say fusing bombs to Rockets to Spears works I killed a series of Bad Guys by turning two logs into a spinning twisting log roll of death then reversed it to kill more who are running towards me from behind I placed a bunch of planks together put some Jets on them and fused the Box shut hit the engines and sent those enemies flying we still have no clue where they are between that and taking jobs reporting for the news helping wagoneers out of holes and oh yeah saving the kingdom tears does cover a huge gamut of activities when it does so the presentation is pretty well done somehow even on a system as ancient and creaky as a switch consistently threatening to bust apart under most games single use of one alpha transparency this is actually a pretty good achievement for the Zelda Developers for example the tempests of wins in the morning or one of the few times we actually get to see wind impact not only the world itself with some blowing trees but yourself kicking the sails up on a boat that you're on that no one has any right wanting to sail on it's one of the first games where the threatening violence of the future in dire circumstances of a kingdom whip around you in a cloud system that honestly is profoundly better than a lot of Next Generation games it's stunning to see how the developers have harnessed the lackluster power of the switch even if the resolution is low enough that the aliasing can cut you however performance is not always spot on sometimes the inevitable question is going to come up and that is does the Aging Hardware the switch impact tiers of the kingdom and I can say with a resounding yes yes it really does it's also got a huge amount of pop-in or low detail textures and more problems that sort of crop up especially as you get later in the game but we knew this might happen the switch Teeters at times on the edge of being overwhelmed by what the devs are actually asking it to perform shown many times by that pop in or some Shadow details or some FPS problems and moments of stutter also other games consistently delivering new ways for you to explore the world occasionally platforming itself can be a bit finicky leaping and sometimes not leaping when you just expect other times it feels pretty smooth the game has an amazing orchestral soaring Blockbuster soundtrack at least that's what someone would probably expect a person to say when they're talking about an open world game but it doesn't just like breath before it Zelda's musical delivery is an odd Wayward single or couple instrument banned as quizzical as link himself and yet replacing swords and shields and Magic Gauntlet abilities with a couple chords a stinger some solo moment that flits up and then like the player themselves gets almost momentarily distracted and just wanders off again the nature of which this soundtrack is is at times very staccato when Whimsical patterns play out in the wind it's rarely ever Forefront but it's so obvious that it's watching you like someone's just skipping along beside you a Bard with some kind of hilarious streak who when you randomly do something odd plays a dirty little ditty and then moves on it's hard to really base the music on anything it's just theirs you to explore it's not nearly the huge hand-waving moments here I am that you see and expect in other titles Harps and pianos and flutes aren't always mixed into their sections but instead like someone grabbed a moment of one musician and said hey man you do the solo here I think it dramatically helps the game even though it's a little less listenable just outside of it the speaking and Voice works pretty well the big issue here with Zelda is that they don't like to use a lot of voices just basically saying one word starting of a sentence that's probably kept the size of the game down and it's probably kept the cost of the game down I will say I'm fine with it with this game but I do believe that full voice over characters would have added a tremendous amount to this game I would have loved to have seen that rolled out to pretty much everybody else speaking of rollouts when you're jumping in there and fighting off 3D enemies in a multiple soundscape kind of system you want to know where they are and that brings us to sound this is pretty good 3D sound it's not necessarily perfect remember you are basically playing on the switch and even if you have it docked it's not really wide when it comes to its sound channels and there's a lot of enemies that can end up fighting you the actual sound effects themselves do appear to be really directly mimicking a lot of the stuff that we heard in the original game there's some tinny audio especially in some of the samples and the rain which sounds a little bit more like somebody just saying shhh versus actual rain in some of these moments and that Tonk sound that you expect from Zelda when you hit an enemy I like it I would like to see it stepped up but that'll probably be for whatever next system and next game that Nintendo has how does all this come together as fun Factor because such a big game all of these different expanses the way in which you move could bring you a boring game it doesn't and it's very difficult to describe why it's hard to put into words the Elation that you can feel in Zelda dropping on some concoction that would make the Wright brothers look at it and be like yeah nope it's not a game that actually has a ton of features other games don't this is profoundly utterly how Zelda Works some are gonna be like soothsayers out there demanding every game has every feature that this title does because Zelda does it but that's not how Zelda actually plays and I feel that that's not really seeing Zelda for what it is it's showing a general lack of knowledge about their games all features and activities create a hole and many features here wouldn't feel amazing in other games however here it's Sublime like the developers decided what should fit and then added more and more and there were a lot of ideas from other open world games that have got in but they put their own unique slant on them and a slant that works here but isn't necessarily a slant you would want to see on other titles the feeling of distance traveled the feeling of a journey here is much closer to The Hobbit and those kind of things versus the d d movie that just came out that is tried and true Zelda so as you guys know I rate games on a buy weight for sale deep deep sail or never touch rating scale this is obviously 100 worth getting a Razor's Edge of dark world's bright moments and right down the center incredible gameplay but it can still cut you a little bit on some of the Oddities that they put into these games I think the big complaint is going to be is it equal to the other title is it equal to the original and that's a question that I think a lot of people are going to discuss for a very great deal of time the original Zelda when it came out on switch was so surprising so stunning so different in how it offered everything that you could certainly enter into tears of the kingdom and then come out of it thinking you know what it is just an improved Sequel and in some ways maybe some things are missing that you might like and in some other ways improvements are here that you may actually enjoy also and it's impossible to ignore this the game does show the weakness of the switch as a platform not only within its actual release sphere and all of the games people played but Additionally the two or three years of development time that it had prior to release this is an ancient chipset and regardless of the skill of the developers and they are certainly skilled you do see some caveats in this game including the occasional times where the different things that you've created will just disappear if you've gotten too far away from the creation Zone which appears to be a memory issue or it could just be a bug it didn't actually come up very often for me but I did notice little quibbles little things that were popping up where you could tell that they were pushing the system just as far as it possibly could go and it really is time for Nintendo to look at this platform and say the competitions out there we got to get these things on a new system because the resolution the detailed textures or lack of detail textures you see here and some other finicky Parts as well as a good deal of loading between locations can certainly remove a bit of that fun Factor the game was still awesome super enjoyable I definitely say it's worth getting but be aware of those problems as always if you like this video give it a thumbs up if you dislike it not only give it a thumbs up but subscribe and share it and of course you can join the patron which helps out the channel because everything gets demonetized anyway at some point or in some way claimed I would appreciate that who knows Nintendo probably copyright this sucker peace out everybody enjoy the rest of your week and if you get the game post what you thought in the comments in fact if you're the first let's say 2 000 people in the comments who comment you'll be the first 2 000 people in the comments to have commented which is pretty damned cool peace out thank you [Music] hmm [Music]

Channel: ACG

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Id: oPfDAi6IoCk

Length: 16min 4sec (964 seconds)

Published: Thu May 11 2023