Daily Debate: Would You Rather Have The Shrine Blessings Be Replaced By Puzzles?

Posted on April 18 2024 by Julia Wilson

I love solving the shrines. It’s one of my favorite parts of the game, and I’m always so disappointed when I get to a shrine to discover that it’s a blessing and not another puzzle to solve. I know in theory you’ve already solved a quest or task to reach the shrine, but you can’t have too many puzzles, can you?

I was very pleased when I realized Tears of the Kingdom has 32 more shrines than Breath of the Wild, but as the game progressed, I discovered that 51 (33.5%) of the total number of shrines where blessings! This is also a large percentage increase in the proportion compared to Breath of the Wild, which has 120 shrines with 29 (19%) of them blessings.

While some of the “transport a crystal across the sky” quests required a little thought, Mayahasik Shrine literally just involved breaking a wall to find the shrine and reveal the blessing, which is such a let down. On the other hand, Mayanas Shrine is the only shrine which requires the completion of a crystal shrine quest and does contain a puzzle, so there really doesn’t seem to be any level of consistency over what constitutes a blessing shrine. Looking at Breath of the Wild, both the Mezza Lo and Toh Yahsa shrines, for example, had a reasonable shrine quest followed by a puzzle inside the shrine. In other instances, a blessing is the reward for actually discovering the shrine, which isn’t usually that difficult.

While I would probably choose to have a blessing over one of those motion controlled “tilt the table to get the ball through the maze” types of shrines – which thankfully weren’t part of Tears of the Kingdom – I definitely think the number of blessings need to be reduced and more puzzles given in their place.

What do you think? Would you have enjoyed solving another puzzle? Or do you think you’ve done enough by either finding the shrine or solving the quest, and the blessing is a fair reward? Let us know in the comments below!