The Legend of Zelda How are you finding/liking TotK?

[Shrimpdragon]

Exactly that.
I’m not that enamoured to be honest, I find the some of the quests annoying the Korok that has to keep being rescued and the idiot holding up the signs!
The mechanics are quite clunky, having to go into the inventory and keep scrolling sideways for the object you want to fit to an arrow, as for throwing a bomb or w h y it’s just time consuming.
It’s ok just not good (in my opinion) as BotW. I seem to waste a lot of achieving not a lot

 

[Chevywolf30]

I can certainly agree with you on there being a LOT of mechanics. Being familiar with BotW helps, but it was still overwhelming early game. Overall though I'm having a good time with it, I haven't really considered where to put it in my overall ranking, but I definitely like it better than BotW at this point. Nearly 100 hours in and still a lot I want to get done, and I'm not really all that burnt out yet.

 

[Dr.Luigi]

Too much building. The game should have been called "Zelda-Kazooie: Nuts & bolts". Yes, a lot of annoying things but you can mostly ignore them and have a good time. I loved the Final boss.

 

[Vanessa28]

So far I like it better than BotW. I agree on the whole scrolling thing but that's something I can deal with. One thing I absolutely like...

Spoiler

Avatars! I got all 4 out and boy do they help me or what?! Most of the time I don't even have to fight enemies myself because they take care of them. Best compagnons ever

So yeah TotK is an absolute fav of mine! So many content

 

[Azure Sage]

It surpassed BotW as my favorite game of all time. It's like 3 botws in one in terms of sheer content and I love it. Plus it did a Lot of things that I both wanted to see from a BotW sequel as well as many things I wanted to see in the Zelda series as a whole. The avatars are foremost at that list. It's seriously one of the best things Zelda has done, ever. If I had to nitpick I wish they didnt look like soulless ghost things but had their actual color scheme filled in, but hey, I'll take what I can get for this. I've been dying for Link to have a party of companions for many, many years. The gameplay loop from BotW has become more satisfying and the story is better and more exciting than ever. Everything about this game is just supremely satisfying.

Even having said all that, I feel like I have more nitpicks for this game than I did for BotW. I could personally find almost no fault with BotW, but here there are a handful of things I could point out to say "yeah that could have been better." But even so, there's nothing I outright dislike and the highs more than make up for my little points of contention, so much so that it surpassed BotW even with it having more faults in my eyes. I have never been happier with a video game. The BotW/AoC/TotK trilogy is going to keep a very special place in my heart forever.

 

[Shrimpdragon]

I’m finding my feet now with this game.
Got some Amiibo cards and restarted the game, with what I now know I’m find it easier!
Trying to stop myself just going back to what I know-BotW.

 

[GZ Zelda]

I initially thought I liked it more than BotW, but I realized that I don't find the shrine content as interesting. And I don't like Fuse. And I don't like the story as much: the Upheaval doesn't hold a candle to the Calamity. But the rest is incredible, the communal feeling of the world is incredible, the building mechanics are insane, the depths are...good but kind of empty. And I really like the caves. Second favorite Zelda game, but def have some problems with it.

 

[Ganondorf]

I'm very conflicted. While I love a lot of the mechanics, I am not sure if I love the GAME...? One note is that I am one of those unicorn people who loved Banjo Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts, & I 100% it back in the day, so it's NOT that aspect.
...
What I do love is fusing. Love how it adds durability & lets me pick & choose aspects like elements with my weapon rather than running around to grab the same flame swords & dump chuchu jelly around in BotW. What I don't love with it is the "quick" menu very quickly becomes... not quick the moment you have one of every type of item. A solution I suppose is to not hoard, but with armor upgrades, you gotta. Very annoying.

Honestly very underwhelmed with the Depths. Too safe. I thought it was very cool the first time I went down there, but now after exploring about 80% of it, it just feels weirdly too empty? Dunno. Can't explain this well, it just feels like a missed opportunity, especially with the certain-someones always being in camps & not really encountered outside of them. Please, make me more paranoid, have them everywhere down there. The depths should have been far more deadly & "end game" to me, I dunno. It's just floor is lava too much, & even that is super easy to avoid & mitigate early on. I was really, really hoping for more UNIQUE life down here, you know?

Now for the general bits. I honestly think this Zelda has had some of THE best boss fights in a long time. Are they perfect? No. Many are rather short or very easy, but the presentation of some of them, & the build up to get to some of them was EXCELLENT. Now the dungeons themselves disappointed me at times, but that is entirely more about length & general graphical presentation with most of them, over the puzzles which I found fine. The lead-ups into those dungeons were super fun for me, & I especially liked some of the puzzles just to get INTO them. My beef with the LOOK of them will have to come elsewhere.

And now the major story of TotK. It. Bad. I will not go into details here, but some reveals had me screaming (in a good way), but others had me screaming from the sheer massive let-down of more than one character feeling wasted or fridged again. There also was major, major issues with every. Single. Temple just... repeating the same lore dump flashback in a "let me copy your homework & change a few words..." feel, which I guess is a side-effect of being able to beat any temple in any order. Awful. THAT is what killed them all for me & made me have 0 urge to go further once I had done my second. Still, I think each temple should have had an introductory flashback speech if you reached it first, or one that instead would reveal a new chunk of information based on what you've already done. Reason being is that these all were monologues played over a cutscene, & most of that easily can be a different recording rather than summing up the SAME event 5 times. I can go on with this, but I was MAJORLY disappointed with that part of the plot. The dragon tears I guess were okay, but the fact that they all can be played out of order is... a decision, I guess. Did not do it for me & the repetition of some segments of those scenes felt rushed & weird. I don't want to quote major things here.

So after all that did I ENJOY the game?
...
I am honestly not sure! It's bananas. The game has jumped leagues & miles ahead of BotW, both in scope, mechanics & general quality of life changes you'll immediately notice. The armor. Weapons. Just... MAN. It needs more time to bake in my head, but I'm so far leaning on "No, I didn't enjoy TotK due to the story". Sadly. I didn't like BotW either! I don't know what it is, just these open world games so far have just had very... TINY stories despite the massive scope they have. Half of it is missable, or repeated, etc. Like? There's just no time to get attached to anything, & if you want to, what you hope is there just... isn't? Oh I hope they'll go more into the royal family, Ganondorf's motivations with some of those scenes, etc (nope!). One of these days I will go off in even more detail, but I'm going to end this here. I don't think I enjoyed TotK overall, but it is fun I goof around in, that I suppose is the major thing for me.

 

[Shrimpdragon]

I could easily go back to BotW, but I’m forcing myself along this game, not sure now the hype justified the game!
I do find the Shrines a bit of a let down, I keep hoping for a bit more of a challenge, getting to the end of a Shrine I’m looking to see if I’ve missed something.
Wasn’t going to but bought myself a new oled screen Switch, I find the screen much brighter and easier for me to see what’s happening now!

 

[LordErec42]

I'm finding this game to pretty much be more BotW, which is understandable given how many people loved that game. I personally didn't really enjoy BoTW that much and TotK hasn't really made any meaningful improvements to the friction points that hurt my enjoyment of BotW and in some cases has added more of its own.

I think fundamentally the core problems both games have are lack of focus and little respect for the player's time. Both games have massive, open worlds that are fun to explore, but the story is really hurt by being able to complete everything in nearly any order and experience the cutscenes out of order (not to mention the complete disregard for existing lore in TotK that even ignores BotW to a large degree with all the Sheikah stuff inexplicably disappearing without a trace). TotK especially has tons of mechanics that barely get used outside of the one shrine/temple and an overwhelming number of silly side challenges with the koroks and signs that just feels like filler content (which also applies to the shrines in general). The depths are huge for the sake of being huge but honestly feel super empty and not that interesting outside of the handful of curated story quests. Link's house in TotK also is just sad. Also related to the lack of story focus, it feels like there's a lot less memorable moments and music in BotW/TotK compared to the earlier games. Both games are massive, but honestly I don't remember experiencing all that many memorable moments outside of a handful of story missions.

In terms of not respecting player time, both games have clunky interfaces and repetitive, unskippable dialog/cutscenes (I hate the blood moons) that waste a lot of time, annoying combat with weapons breaking all the time that requires going back to the inventory exacerbating the interface problem and creating a lot of extra grind to constantly replenish weapons/shields (and in TotK its even worse since you need to grind fuse materials as well to get something decent and the Zonai devices are also consumables). Armor upgrades and rupee farming are massive additional timesinks for very little actual gaming enjoyment, it's just an uninteresting, repetitive chore to progress the game. Honestly figuring out and pulling off the crazy duplication glitches are a lot more interesting than the actual gameplay loop to farm the items.

Comparing both games to the standard of Skyrim, I think despite all of Skyrim's technical issues/bugs it still succeeded where BotW/TotK failed by not having these same core issues. Skyrim feels like a cohesive world and a focused gaming experience with an epic story and tons of memorable gaming moments. The game is massive, but it doesn't feel like a grind in the same way that BotW/TotK does. Combat is much faster with no need to swap out weapons all the time since nothing breaks, and normal quest progression/exploration gives you tons of gold at the higher levels and there's in-game vendors selling nearly every item so it's pretty easy to buy whatever you need in the later game with no need to tediously farm/grind specific items.

A good way to sum up both games is that they feel like Ubisoft titles now. Giant map with tons of content that sounds amazing on paper, but in practice most of the content ultimately ends up being bland filler/grind once the novelty wears off.

 

[BoxTar]

I liked it better than BotW. But idk if I wanna go back to it as much as I did BotW.

I love the new enemy types and the fusion system, but even then, I still feel as if there are enemies simply missing from the lore. Gleeoks were fun to see, I'm glad Gibdos are back, but there's just so many other things, like Leevers and Peahats, that I just wish were also present within the game. Definitely an improvement tho.

The depths, while I found it fun at first, turned into a MASSIVE chore real quick. And like...it wasn't even really that fun at all to get into? I found myself getting into this...cycle of going up into the sky to find a few maps, then went down to the depths to get the clothes. It was fun, because the reward was always getting some kind of new clothing, but after a while I just found myself not caring as much. Just got too repetetive I guess. Didn't help that all the sky islands were copy-pasted everywhere, so I couldn't keep track of where I had been and where I hadn't outside of the Hero's Path.

I love the variety in attire but at the same time, I found myself not caring about upgrading most of the equipment. A lot of it just gives a vague "attack up", which is...fine, I guess, but I really wish there was something else to them. It made me stop caring about upgrading everything after a while, which made me stop caring about collecting all the armor.

I agree with OP about backpacker Koroks. Never cared about helping them outside of a few, and I usually just ended up tossing them down hills like a sadistic jerk most of the time.

It felt as if there were just more...distractions, not necessarily more things to do.

All that aside, though, I still really enjoyed playing it. The sequence in which you get the Master Sword back is one of my favorite in the entire series, the Temples, while not fully what I want out of a Zelda dungeon, were a nice touch, and the fight with Ganon at the end was a lot of fun. It'll probably be a game I reflect on a lot and will likely slide down my ranker over time, but for now, I think its a really solid Zelda title, and closer to what I would want out of open world Zelda games.

 

[BokoblinBrad]

For me TotK is a really good game first time round, however, I think it'll be a very long time before I'd want to go back to it to play again as there's so much it'll feel a bit of a chore to do all over again.

 

[Shrimpdragon]

Yes I find it a bit hard work, you have to do a lot to get little!

 

[Bowsette Plus-Ultra]

I'm couple months separated from TotK at this point. I benefited from the game being leaked way back on May 2nd, so I got to play it a solid two weeks ahead of the people who were doing the right thing and waiting for the proper Switch release.

First of all is the gameplay: I liked the ins and outs of Breath of the Wild's combat and navigation, so the transition to TotK's combat and traversal was pretty smooth. If you liked BotW then you'll probably like how TotK plays, and I liked BotW. It still feels good finding my own way around things, clamoring over mountains, and raining down hellfire on a group of bokoblins who are probably just trying to figure out what to eat for dinner.

I like the temples. While temples in TotK maintain the weird touch-five-things-to-access-the-boss objective, there's a mix-up among the different dungeon structures. It feels good to visit a dungeon and not see an identical aesthetic each time. Heck, it feels nice just to have the companions tagging along in each dungeon. It definitely gives the sense that people like Sidon aren't totally incapable, just mostly incapable.

The big thing that stands out for me: the story.

I cannot stress how much the story of TotK sucks. I don't think I've ever felt as talked down to and insulted by the premise of a video game sequel as I have by TotK. My initial excitement for the story a the first mention of the Imprisoning War petered out quickly as I realized that the game really didn't give a carp about the lore. Dark Master got to witness my spiraling enthusiasm as I went from being genuinely excited about the story to actively skipping cutscenes the longer it went on.

I detested TotK's story. It felt so bad that it was insulting, like I was being talked down to as a writer while the game shoved embarrassing writing in my face. I don't think I've ever felt as insulted by a Zelda story as I was by TotK.

 

[DivineDragoness]

I didn't beat it and have been taking a break for a while. Which is really weird, because I was obsessed with BotW for literal months and couldn't put it down. I think Tears ultimately just didn't bring enough new to the table for me to feel like I was able to get completely lost in it. Honestly, Ultrahand isn't really fun for me to use and that seems to be where most of the new ideas are centered around.

I'll def beat it at some point since I payed the $70 for it, but it's a little upsetting that it's flat out not as good as BotW for me. This is probably my text book example of why not to get too caught up in prerelease hype