Tears of the Kingdom this rivals some of the worst games i've ever played; and i'm a life-long zelda fan

[DeletedUser82739]

The beauty in a game like tears is that you have the freedom to approach puzzles in any way you like. Sure you can abuse ultra hand/recall and cheese your way through everything, and I imagine if you do it would dampen your opinion in the game. I found it much more satisfying to either solve the puzzles the intended way or try to find a different workaround that felt clever. There are so many options provided, and how you approach things is completely up to you.

 

[thePlinko]

The beauty in a game like tears is that you have the freedom to approach puzzles in any way you like. Sure you can abuse ultra hand/recall and cheese your way through everything, and I imagine if you do it would dampen your opinion in the game. I found it much more satisfying to either solve the puzzles the intended way or try to find a different workaround that felt clever. There are so many options provided, and how you approach things is completely up to you.

That’s exactly the issue. If I have to arbitrarily restrict myself from the easiest solution in order for a game to be either fun or challenging, then the game as it is designed is neither fun nor challenging. It’s not my job to add my own rules to a game, it’s the developers. That is literally the point of game design.

 

[Malon]

That’s exactly the issue. If I have to arbitrarily restrict myself from the easiest solution in order for a game to be either fun or challenging, then the game as it is designed is neither fun nor challenging. It’s not my job to add my own rules to a game, it’s the developers. That is literally the point of game design.

It's meant to be creative. There are so many amazing things you can build with ultrahand, and that's one of the reasons people like it so much. The point of the freedom to play the game how you want is not to insult your intelligence, but to merely let you play how you want to play. You can solve the puzzles as intended if that's what you want, or you can make your own wacky solution that uses twelve swords connected together to look like Puss in Boots' symbol. The point is that there are a multitude of options for solutions. If that's not your cup of tea, then don't drink the tea.

There are rules to the game, but they aren't insanely restricted. The game is rated E10, a rating that appeals to tweens and teens, who aren't exactly known for a love of strict rules. Some of the rules are not as clear, but that's because the developers don't WANT them to be clear.

Tears took six years to make. Six years. Sure, maybe it's because they took some time off. But the majority of it was just because making the mechanics was so complicated. Not to mention, making video games is HARD. The amount of work that's put into it is nuts. They deserve breaks. They deserve to be let off easy. Instead of that, we relentlessly criticize games that they put an immense amount of work into. That's quite vexing, I imagine. And tell me this: If the game is so awful, how did 21.04 million copies get sold?

You can dislike the game. That's fine. I imagine many people disagree with me about Zelda 1, which I thought was boring. But I only thought it was boring because I have had the experience of fantastic games from MY time. I don't have any nostalgia with it. But I can be impressed by it. And I don't ceaselessly criticize it.

You may respond as you wish, but keep in mind that I am using calm language and trying to maintain a respectful tone. Thumper it. If you don't have anything nice to say, don't say anything at all. Or at least warp it so it sounds nice.

 

[whatever]

@Angopik Sorry I'm not going to be able to debate it with you, you've asked good questions against my post, which I could answer, but to do do so would take a fair amount of time and energy from me and I guess I don't care enough to do that; go ahead and take a win from that if you want. I wanted to vent my frustration about the game and was hoping my post would resonate with some people, and it looks it did, so that's all I was looking for. Yes I'm sure I exaggerated at times throughout the post, like there aren't literally THOUSANDS of costumes to collect for example; but I know what I saw and experienced and I hope that people who experienced the game similarly can read this and have some small catharsis from doing so. Nintendo are far far beyond my reach, this post will have little to no effect on what game they produce next, so I don't think there's any danger of my words jeopardising the chances of the next game being similar to totk, and you liked totk so I guess don't worry about it.

If you're seriously genuine in saying that you very much enjoyed it, then good for you and I guess there are good times ahead for you with whatever this is that The Legend of Zelda has become. Of course Nintendo couldn't continue to re-work the OoT formula over and over forever, but I was hoping that BotW would evolve into something different to it, but just as good, but instead it's whatever TotK is, so oh well.

Have you tried to reach 100% completion rate in TotK?

I said I'm not doing the Koroks and I'm not going to go and beat every Hinos, Gleeok and Frox on the map just because they're there. I'll do the rest of the Shrines and quests, I'll probably do the recipes and compendium eventually, and the rest I think I've pretty-much covered already. Once the Shrines are done there won't be much left to frustrate unless there are still some quests that require you to build some god-awful raft or wagon, so it will probably just feel like doing some more BotW DLC, which will be fine.

i dint enjoy it either main bumed was the weapons breaking.....

Yeah I wished they'd addressed and re-worked some of those issues BotW had with the development-time rather than what they ended up doing instead.

One must wonder, did you join to simply rant about a game many people enjoy?
In the most respectful way possible, of course.

I did join just to post this yes. I hate reddit.com so this seemed the best place for it. Not to try and rain on the joy of others, no; I wanted to vent and provide a little voice for others who were similarly frustrated by it. I'm sure many people enjoyed it; many hated it also.

Sounds like a skill issue.

You didn't read the post-script. Do you have a literacy-issue maybe?

 

[Angopik]

The many interviews where they say some variation of the phrase “solve puzzles any way you can think of.

Correct me if im wrong, but the puzzles aren't the entire game, are they? They also have intended ways to solve them, right?

The fact that nearly every single “puzzle” amounts to using the exact same solution because they refuse to add any semblance of actual design.

That's interesting. My experience was different. I used all the abilities I gained to solve the puzzles. It never felt like I used one ability. Yes, there were a lot of similarities, but that's not surprising. There were 100+ shrines in each game.

I don't see how that makes it unfinished though. I'd argue that just makes it a bit repetitive, but that's on the player. Not the devs. Players can just use different solutions.

It’s insane how “hand holding” was such a major complaint from the older Zeldas and yet their solution was to make games that exist for the sole purpose of catering to stupid people.

Zelda games have always been for the same kind of people. Are you calling fans of Zelda 1 stupid? What about Link's Awakening?

 

[whatever]

That's just like, your opinion, man


There's a lot of valid criticism here
But I really want to push back against your labeling the devs "lazy"
Game devs are rarely ever lazy. If something looks sloppy or like shortcuts were taken, it's because they physically didn't have time to fix it properly, or they didn't have the technical knowhow. Laziness is basically never the cause

Thanks. I think the apathy and laziness stemmed from the executives—the producers and the directors I guess. It's odd, because you can kind of feel the usual Nintendo-Zelda engine whirring away underneath all the bad design choices. Like, you can tell the dialogue writers did the best with what they were given. It's like the team polished everything thoroughly, even the stuff that was already rotten. The bad stuff stemmed from bad design choices across the board—the story, the programming, the game-systems, and so on—and those decisions will have been made by the heads of each department. I can't blame the staff who were just doing what they were told to bring the game to life, to execute the decisions made by the team-leaders, I guess those staff didn't know the game would turn-out like it did, and they were probably contracted into it and so perhaps couldn't quit if they saw half-way that it was going to be a disaster of game-design anyway. It's the people who made the major decisions about the game that I think are to blame.

 

[thePlinko]

It's meant to be creative. There are so many amazing things you can build with ultrahand, and that's one of the reasons people like it so much. The point of the freedom to play the game how you want is not to insult your intelligence, but to merely let you play how you want to play. You can solve the puzzles as intended if that's what you want, or you can make your own wacky solution that uses twelve swords connected together to look like Puss in Boots' symbol. The point is that there are a multitude of options for solutions. If that's not your cup of tea, then don't drink the tea.

The fact of the matter is that it’s not creative. There is no creativity inherently involved in playing Tears of the Kingdom whatsoever. The only time you will ever be “creative” in TotK is when you restrict yourself beyond the easiest solution, and that’s not something designed within the game. For that matter, you can do the exact same thing playing Ocarina of Time, Skyward Sword, Link to the Past, and Zelda 1.

If a puzzle doesn’t test your intelligence, then it’s an objectively bad puzzle.

There are rules to the game, but they aren't insanely restricted. The game is rated E10, a rating that appeals to tweens and teens, who aren't exactly known for a love of strict rules. Some of the rules are not as clear, but that's because the developers don't WANT them to be clear.

Age ratings are irrelevant. Teens and tweens aren’t stupid. They can handle game design that requires actual thought to play. They’ve been doing that since game design was a thing to begin with.

Tears took six years to make. Six years. Sure, maybe it's because they took some time off. But the majority of it was just because making the mechanics was so complicated. Not to mention, making video games is HARD. The amount of work that's put into it is nuts. They deserve breaks. They deserve to be let off easy. Instead of that, we relentlessly criticize games that they put an immense amount of work into. That's quite vexing, I imagine.

I’m not denying that a lot of work went into the game. I’ve said multiple times over that on a technical level the game is insanely impressive. That doesn’t make the game well designed or immune to criticism. All of that effort went into making a game that is intentionally poorly designed, and they deserve to be criticized for it.

Let it be vexing. Maybe they’ll use that frustration to make a better game next time.

And tell me this: If the game is so awful, how did 21.04 million copies get sold?

What you just presented to me is an ad populum logical fallacy, otherwise known as bandwagon. Just because something is popular doesn’t make it good. McDonalds sells more food in a week than every single Michelin 5-star restaurant has in their entire combined existence. Does that make McDonalds good food? No, it’s awful and we all criticize it for being awful.

I’ll tell you exactly how TotK managed to sell 21.04 million copies. It was the direct sequel to the best selling game in the series (which itself was released during the perfect storm to give itself a sales advantage) released on one of the best selling consoles of all time that is known for having disproportionately high attachment rates for its games.

You can dislike the game. That's fine. I imagine many people disagree with me about Zelda 1, which I thought was boring. But I only thought it was boring because I have had the experience of fantastic games from MY time. I don't have any nostalgia with it. But I can be impressed by it. And I don't ceaselessly criticize it.

Nostalgia has nothing to do with it. You dislike Zelda 1 because you think it’s boring. I dislike TotK because it’s a bad game. I endlessly criticize it because Zelda deserves better, and criticism is how we make sure that it gets better.

 

[whatever]

In this case when the games entire gimmick is “we force the player to design the game for us” it’s kind of hard to not call it lazy. They had 6 years and all of the technical knowhow in the world and yet they intentionally released an unfinished product and were proud of it.

It's definitely more buggy than BotW. I noticed a number of bugs throughout my playthrough, and I've read of others that other people experienced too.

 

[thePlinko]

Correct me if im wrong, but the puzzles aren't the entire game, are they? They also have intended ways to solve them, right?

It applies to the entire game. Puzzle solving, combat, and navigation all struggle to have any semblance of meaningful choice on account of TotKs insistence on letting any solution work for any problem.

That's interesting. My experience was different. I used all the abilities I gained to solve the puzzles. It never felt like I used one ability. Yes, there were a lot of similarities, but that's not surprising. There were 100+ shrines in each game.

I don't see how that makes it unfinished though. I'd argue that just makes it a bit repetitive, but that's on the player. Not the devs. Players can just use different solutions.

That is 100% on the devs. It’s not the players job to make a game not repetitive. If there is a dominant strategy in a game, then it’s the developers job to break that dominant strategy. This is literally game design 101.

Zelda games have always been for the same kind of people. Are you calling fans of Zelda 1 stupid? What about Link's Awakening?

This is categorically untrue. Literally the entire point of the modern Zeldas has been to appeal to a completely different demographic from previous games, most notably people who didn’t like the older Zeldas to begin with. None of those older games had puzzles that could be solved by just flying around them with zero thought or effort.

 

[whatever]

It's meant to be

It looks like it is a divisive game, it's not universally despised nor loved, so that explains the sales-figures; also, it's a 3D-Zelda, so it's going to sell quite a lot no matter what.

To try and summarise what I hated about it: OoT, MM, WW, TP and BotW had a magic to them, an intense concentration of some very special creative 'something'; I felt little to none of it in this game. The moments that came closest to that feeling were my early-game attempt to get to Ganondorf and exploring that 'approach to gloom' area, without knowing what the rest of the game had in store for me; and then my early impressions of the depths probably; the "thousands of years will pass in the blink of an eye!" line in that cutscene hit pretty hard; and the final dive to catch zelda was very cool, though, it left a bitter taste in my mouth when I remembered the rest of the game that that moment was built on. OoT and MM especially were crafted with a great deal of care with regard their worlds, their temples and dungeons and their atmospheres. A huge amount of careful imagination went into those game; a huge amount of effort to really make a fantastic world which you had never seen the like of before. Each dungeon in OoT is a masterpiece of level-design, not only from the viewpoint of the challenge of beating them but also for their sheer aesthetics and atmospheres and for their very tastefully and cleverly designed room and floor layouts. I just didn't feel any of that masterful—genius, really—creativity in this game. Not to leave SS out either, there were many special moments in that game also, but in my opinion, having recently played the Switch version, it doesn't hold-up nearly as well as the others. I can still just sit back and enter a memory of playing those games I mentioned above and feel that magic they contained wash over me: the timelessness of just being anywhere at all in the Lost Woods; the feeling of my whole mind and body being almost literally transported into a new world as I entered Clock Town as the Deku Scrub that Christmas morning; the bubbling tangible heat of Dragon Roost Cavern as you swing over the lava with the grappling hook; the feeling like the whole world was ahead of you as you first galloped into Hyrule Field in TP with that unstoppable soundtrack; the literal urgency I felt to save Zelda from Calamity Ganon, compelling me to get strong enough for the battle as soon as I possibly could, how powerful and noble she seemed as she finally sealed him away; the way the lighting strikes your sword as you deliver the final blow to Demise.

 

[Malon]

I'm not saying it's the best game ever. I very much enjoyed OOT and MM more than TotK. I'm saying that saying the game is outright bad is not true. If someone with no prior Zelda knowledge played it, they would most likely enjoy the hell out of it.

On another note, the music is one of the main things I judge, which is probably why I love Zelda so much.

And TotK has a banger of a main theme, you can't argue.

 

[whatever]

I'm not saying it's the best game ever. I very much enjoyed OOT and MM more than TotK. I'm saying that saying the game is outright bad is not true. If someone with no prior Zelda knowledge played it, they would most likely enjoy the hell out of it.

On another note, the music is one of the main things I judge, which is probably why I love Zelda so much.

And TotK has a banger of a main theme, you can't argue.

Yes you're probably right that first-time players would enjoy it a lot, I think though provided they don't have years and years of one-player adventure-game gaming-experience behind them (though I can't imagine such a person being a first-time Zelda player though so).

I'm not joking you're going to have to remind what TotK's main music-theme is because it was so too weak to stick in my mind. Which cutscene does it play in again? I already said that the sky's theme is very good, and that of the Depths is great too. The musical design in the whole area that approaches Ganondorf is very well done. The lower Hyrule Castle music did a great job of getting a melancholic vibe going, but the upper Hyrule Castle theme was a bit off the wall in my opinion and didn't fit the context of the game, just felt like it was trying hard to recreate BotW's castle feel. We've already heard hundreds of hours of Hyrule Field's gentle BotW piano music, so it was annoying that they pretty much just copy-pasted it back here—obviously, it was excellent in BotW, but just annoying that they copy-pasted it back here. Caldera's theme was excellent of course, but none of the other boss' themes stuck with me (with the exception of the Flux Construct's, I think they wrote that very well to match the character of that boss), and the temples' themes were forgettable. The shrine music was good, but I think BotW's was better. The same team did a great job with the theme's of each of the Champions in BotW I thought, and Age of Calamity's sound-track, build on that BotW music, was incredible I thought; I guess they just ran out of steam here.

Thing is that Koji Kondo is gone, so I doubt Zelda's music will ever be as great as it was again; though, they're still doing overall a good job without him by the examples I've already given here. Feels forced sometimes though, like Lookout Landing's theme just feels like they needed SOMETHING other than silence, and I've always hated BotW's Kakariko Village theme.

 

[Turo602]

You didn't read the post-script. Do you have a literacy-issue maybe?

I stopped reading once your complaints were literally just you whining about how awful you were at the game as if it's somehow the game's fault despite such issues not reflecting the average experience.

 

[Ghost of Mikeys Past]

Thanks. I think the apathy and laziness stemmed from the executives—the producers and the directors I guess. It's odd, because you can kind of feel the usual Nintendo-Zelda engine whirring away underneath all the bad design choices. Like, you can tell the dialogue writers did the best with what they were given. It's like the team polished everything thoroughly, even the stuff that was already rotten. The bad stuff stemmed from bad design choices across the board—the story, the programming, the game-systems, and so on—and those decisions will have been made by the heads of each department. I can't blame the staff who were just doing what they were told to bring the game to life, to execute the decisions made by the team-leaders, I guess those staff didn't know the game would turn-out like it did, and they were probably contracted into it and so perhaps couldn't quit if they saw half-way that it was going to be a disaster of game-design anyway. It's the people who made the major decisions about the game that I think are to blame.

You could make an argument for apathy. I do think aonuma wants to make good games, I just don't think he has the same sort of vision that a producer really needs; he might be better in another role. Unfortunately the industry has shown that walking simulators are massively popular and challenge needs only be imagined to be satisfying

It’s insane how “hand holding” was such a major complaint from the older Zeldas and yet their solution was to make games that exist for the sole purpose of catering to stupid people.

I made my last post before seeing this: you just have to convince people that what they're doing is strategic, even if in reality it isn't. Think about games like Uno or Sorry where there aren't any real tactical decisions to be made, yet they still give you the illusion of agency by offering a couple key decisions that aren't necessarily always correct in a vacuum and are still incredibly popular games for people of all ages

 

[Malon]

Zelda: Tears Of The Kingdom Is Now The "Highest Rated Game Of All Time" On OpenCritic

And it's Metacritic's highest rated game of 2023

www.nintendolife.com

Gamespot ranks ToTK as the #1 Zelda of all time - Nintendo Switch

For Nintendo Switch on the Nintendo Switch, a GameFAQs message board topic titled "Gamespot ranks ToTK as the #1 Zelda of all time".

gamefaqs.gamespot.com