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So for as much as I disliked the four dungeons narrative repetition, everything after that was WAY BETTER than Breath of the Wild's finale. I still don't like that Zelda didn't end up playable or just way more active in the immediate plot after she was built up to be so much more of a fully defined cool person in BOTW, but that's pretty much my only complaint. Even durability is basically a solved problem in Tears of the Kingdom. If I really reach for it, I guess I feel just a tinge of melancholy because horses just get left behind all the new traversal you can do. Absolutely loved the music choices for the final stuff too. As weird as it is though, I feel totally content with my time in TOTK while BOTW still kinda draws me back to it. I have no explanation for this.
I mentioned mostly complaints because there are so few of them, but damn I am glowing with appreciation for this game on the whole. Near-completely explored the depths, revealed the whole of every piece of the map, did tons of sidequests and I think I did at least 120 shrines. I feel like I did way more even though I spent a lot less time in this compared to BOTW. My profile says I sunk 220+ hours into this but I know I accidentally left the game running overnight a couple times so there's like 40 extra hours being tacked on it. Had a fantastic time.
Though at the end of it all I find myself wanting to go back to the more traditional Zelda style so I guess I'm due to play Majora's Mask again, maybe to close out the year.
I beat the game this weekend, too. One comment, one question, and another comment about the ending sequence:
Comment: Pick a lane and stick to it. I thought it was cool and appropriately epic when I got the message that I was too deep in the Earth to "reach" my sage buddies, so I would have to go it alone. And then the real sages all showed up for the big army battle! And then I had to go it alone, again, because a bunch of bosses showed up. And then I had a 1-on-1 with Ganondorf, and he summoned reinforcements, and then the sages showed up to help again! Before I went back to another solo fight with Ganondorf. Like, guys, fool me once...
Question: The final-final swordfight with Ganondorf, before he goes dragon: how were you supposed to win that one? He started dodging even my flurries, and his projectiles were wrecking my best shields. I managed to literally back him into a corner, and I guess he couldn't dodge against a solid wall, so I just kind of clubbed him to death with the Master Sword like a caveman. I assume I was supposed to be doing something more elegant there.
Comment: Everybody seems to know that eating a secret stone transforms you into a "mindless" dragon. Zelda had to be told, but Ganondorf just knows, and it is not like the cat lady would have told him. So how did that become common knowledge? Did Goat God very publicly give a secret stone to a toddler, and the inevitable happened?
Question: The final-final swordfight with Ganondorf, before he goes dragon: how were you supposed to win that one? He started dodging even my flurries, and his projectiles were wrecking my best shields. I managed to literally back him into a corner, and I guess he couldn't dodge against a solid wall, so I just kind of clubbed him to death with the Master Sword like a caveman. I assume I was supposed to be doing something more elegant there.
What I did was get him to that final phase. When he attacks, flurry rush, which will cause him to retaliate with this own flurry rush. When he does, dodge and flurry rush that. I never seen him do a second dodge + flurry, so I assume that's the "intended" way. So, dodge his flurry rush, retaliate with another one off your own.
What I did was get him to that final phase. When he attacks, flurry rush, which will cause him to retaliate with this own flurry rush. When he does, dodge and flurry rush that. I never seen him do a second dodge + flurry, so I assume that's the "intended" way. So, dodge his flurry rush, retaliate with another one off your own.
Oh, see, I feel like this is one of those rare times Nintendo failed at informing the player. I assumed since he was dodging my first flurry rush consistently, he would dodge EVERY flurry rush, so pursuing parrying was a fool's errand. Live and learn (and kill a demon king).
Yeah, (final boss) if you attack/flurry, he'll dodge and rush you back; you have to flurry his rush to hit him with it. This was extremely frustrating to me because I totally suck at dodge timing, so it took a long time to even figure out that it was possible though it was what I assumed the moment I heard he could dodge/flurry you. You can also definitely use arrows; I hit him with a gibdo-bone arrow every time he jumped back to throw some of his bullshit at me.
I feel like parry worked for me but that might've been the immediate prior phase. It was possible to catch him if he whiffed a couple of his bigger attacks for sure though.
Loving it. But...65 hours in, most of the map opened up, 23 roots in the depths illuminated...hundreds of Zonite collected...and I still haven't found a use for it.
would recommend not spending it down too aggressively, the charges for the gachapon machines are really common and there's a persistent use for it in the long term which you might not end up using much but you'll probably want to find out first by getting the final rune, which lets you autobuild constructions. it'll flag items in the immediate vicinity to use first, and then supply the rest by burning zonaite directly
but if you have a ton using some for battery charges is totally reasonable. although many chests and harder enemies down there like lynels also drop 20% of a battery at once, and there's a few spots where you can do a fight for 100% of one
I've been wracking my brain for a way to describe where they are without spoiling...
Um, they're near places where one would find zonite. Not where you actually find zonite but rather where you would expect find zonite if Hyrule was real and not a video game with resources lying around all over the place.
You might have passed some and not realized they're anything because some of them don't activate until you talk to their resident construct. They tend to blend in a little before they're turned on, so to speak.
saw credits, got the rewards from all shrines, and did a bunch of other stuff. there's lots of items i know are around i never found, and entire branches of mechanics i dabbled like 10% in if at all
there's something deeply bizarre about playing this game at all, even knowing that in a sense it represents the result of hundreds of people working on what has to have been at least a somewhat continuous project for over a decade, and built on the foundations of a game originally targeted at somewhat lower hardware. it just kind of doesn't make any sense for a game to be this big and complicated, and so polished and detailed at the same time, even before getting into the specifics of what the system is. the seams are there, and they pop out every once in a while, or more if you start doing stuff that really pulls at the edges of what the game allows, but so many other games would just never allow those things in the first place. and there's the occasional very funny videogame oddity, like when the (gerudo canyon shrine) yiga guy you're talking to helpfully marks all the locations he wants you to visit on your piece of suspiciously rare technology. though the gag continues if you enter the base and the trainer guy there tells everyone to fight you "as if link himself was here"
i wrote about this elsewhere, and probably will further at some point now that i've reached a point of relative satiation for a bit (honestly, the main things i want to do are learn a bunch more about how the last party member interacts with things and spend a lot longer flying around the sky with the dragons...), but there's really something about the way this game's powers involve deconstructing and reconstructing the world. ascend is like a combination of cheating and seeing people working on the set of a film production or something, highlighted by the fact that the designers themselves have described it as something they originally used for debugging. and the construction systems are similarly a means through which the designers invite the player to join them in discovering the world and creating new parts of it, something literalized in the shrines, addison's mini-builds, and helpful half- and fully-constructed contraptions around you can use as a basis for new ideas. or just slam them together and start riding around because it's convenient.
all of this adds up to a game that, like skyward sword, asks a lot of players, both in quantity and the general offbeat sense of the core mechanics compared to the mostly more traditional videogame abilities in the first. as a result, i ended up taking a few breaks of a few days because it was like "well, i want to do this thing that would involve a bunch of testing and building, but i don't want to do that right now, so i'll just wait." but i'm fine with that feeling too. even the combat floor is somewhat higher this time; it really feels like the game regularly expects you to take advantage of mechanics that involved rarer resources in breath of the wild like elemental weapons and arrows that explode. though there's a totally new thing too that also evens the scales a bit, which are, of course, the party members, which i loved in part because of the janky feel. it's like final fantasy xv but a lot more like a normal game, and it's appropriate for that game to have "worse" mechanics while this one is still kind of about making the player feel really cool. the chaos of trying to activate them in combat makes doing so often more difficult than the reward, especially because riju is really aggressive which doesn't work that well with trying to aim bow shots. but i think that's funny and great, and now that i've spent a bunch of time learning how to aim in nintendo games i felt super sick with the bow really often anyway
the depths also reminded me of that game and the freaky atmosphere of bumping into harder enemies at night, and the weird feeling of climbing around while kind of trying to guess at what was ahead and facing odd setbacks and obstacles was a weird feeling that also felt like a throwback to my first half of botw. otherwise i think they're really a fair bit bigger than they are interesting, although they do interact with the rest of the game to make a really broad ecosystem of progression and resources i think is mostly interesting, especially because there's so little down there you truly "need"
overall, i don't think this game is absolutely better across the board than breath of the wild, but i really did enjoy most elements the same or more, and my particular biggest complaints have basically all been changed; i think my least favorite boss fight in the game i still liked better than any of them in botw. despite that, i think there's still some stuff that feels charming in the first game by comparison, and i think this game has similarly beckoned me to spend some more time exploring there someday. and the story's still not much more than i expected, but it feels like such a small part of the experience it's hard for me to even consider it that much in my overall reaction. i do think it's really funny that it seems to be implied to be a ff-style causation loop due to the fact that one of the flashbacks involves zelda telling ganondorf that he'll be defeated by the sword that seals darkness, connecting back to his mocking of the master sword at the start of the game
there was only one shrine where i gave up on the apparent theme of the puzzle and did shenanigans instead. overall i liked them, even if it was kind of a bummer that most of the shrines that use the "start with almost nothing" concept feel like tutorials for various ideas over the surprise microcosm of the game it originally was, and the music tracks inside were maybe my favorite music in the game this time, haha. here's my short list of favorites i recommend checking out if you missed them, i would say they're mostly a bit out of the way:
kudanisar - north gerudo desert
mayak - north of death mountain
mayanas - eastern sky
tadarok - hyrule plateau cave
siyamotsus - desert sky
sifumim - lurelin village
it's weird to play something that i thought was fun for like 95% of 120+ hours but also so relaxed and inviting that i want to spend more time doing basically "nothing" inside of it. at the same time, i think the number of top-tier moments is comparable to skyward sword's in my view, so the result is a kind of weird thing where it's like, a lot of the stuff there is to do is very good, and would absolutely be the best part of many other games...but still almost feels like filler just because they've set the bar so high. but also, the combination of ambitious system work and the game's choice not to particularly acknowledge a lot of your choices (even though you get them constantly) makes this game feel like a modern and pseudo-realistic take on the oddball stuff put out by kawazu's team and friends like legend of mana and saga games, and i love that.
The general guide to forges, aside from that central one, is that you will find them at the mining locations where the Yiga have stuff all over. If they're entirely empty mining areas, they'll have a chest instead.
And yes, it is such a cool game. And I love how open-ended the puzzle design is. If you can't figure out how to make the physics work with what's provided there's almost always another way (last night I was doing a shrine where there was ice and plates and spikes and a target to hit and I didn't actually want to figure it out so just used a bomb arrow).
i cannot for the life of me figure out flurry rushes or parries in this game, and honestly it feels like i have almost no 1 handed weapons to take advantage of such things anyway.
this advice will not make everything easier, but in terms of flurry dodge, the timing of enemy attacks and the collision space for link that the game checks are much more generous than you might think, so the simplest way to make it work more often (since, especially if you're in shield stance beforehand, you probably dodged "too early") is to dodge a second time immediately if you don't get a rush the first time. for left/right you should go back in the direction you came from, for backhops you can just backhop again. basically, you can often move your body back into a valid space to get the flurry rush even if you've already avoided the attack
Good news is you don't need a 1-hander for flurries, spears and claymores aren't inhibited if you hold up a shield to make the dodge safer. But yeah one-handers are definitely the way to go for parries.
i cannot for the life of me figure out flurry rushes or parries in this game, and honestly it feels like i have almost no 1 handed weapons to take advantage of such things anyway.
Flurry rushes are deceptively simple: if you are wielding a weapon and initiate a backflip or side jump while near an active enemy hitbox, that triggers a flurry rush. If you trigger it too soon, it's just maybe trying to dodge out of the way; too late and you might get hit. I find the spacing harder than the timing.
I can’t stop doing inane sidequests that give no meaningful reward. I think tying piece of heart equivalents solely to shrines does a major disservice to side quests and mini games. You don’t even get clothes as regularly this time from people since most of them are hidden in caves.
Man I can't navigate the fire temple at all. Everything is kind of same and it's hard to orient myself. Probably just going to look up a guide so I can get back to doing fun things outside if temples and shrines.
I had very hard time with the Fire Temple the day before yesterday. I was able to cheat a number of puzzle solutions by climbing around buildings, shooting far off switches with long range bows, and using a hot air balloon. Much more complicated than the Wind and Water temples.
I can’t stop doing inane sidequests that give no meaningful reward. I think tying piece of heart equivalents solely to shrines does a major disservice to side quests and mini games. You don’t even get clothes as regularly this time from people since most of them are hidden in caves.
Some of them give you new paraglider cloth, which is also useless because I have the Wind Fish Egg cloth and why the hell would I ever switch away from something so perfect
Some of them give you new paraglider cloth, which is also useless because I have the Wind Fish Egg cloth and why the hell would I ever switch away from something so perfect
