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The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom - Breath Wilder

BEAT

LOUDSKULL
(DUDE/BRO)
Yeah, Link's gotta be in his 20s by now.
My read on Mattison is that she's around 7, so if we assume that Link's about the same age as Zelda, who was stated to be 17 in Breath of the Wild, they're both around 24-25 by this game.

I think that makes him the oldest Link ever.
 

gogglebob

The Goggles Do Nothing
(he/him)
Well, I mean, they are both in their hundreds.

Alternatively: everything about Link is dead forever as of the end of the prologue of Breath of the Wild, and a working physical body was basically regrown from scratch. He was born the moment Breath of the Wild started. The reborn tabula rasa Link is now seven. He's one of the youngest Links.
 

BEAT

LOUDSKULL
(DUDE/BRO)
I got the Master Sword before it even occurred to me to check out the big ground drawings, but the second I saw the light dragon's hair I was like "oh shit that's Zelda."

Didn't ruin eventually going and finding all the geoglyphs and seeing how it all happened. Just a thing you can do that makes the reveal earlier.
 

Sarcasmorator

Same as I ever was
(He/him)
Eh. I think whatever time has passed between the prologue and Link waking up is minimal, and the big jump is between games. There's still a search party at the castle looking for them both, as if it's been days at most, and the fallen ruins are all new.
 

BEAT

LOUDSKULL
(DUDE/BRO)
Yeah that's my take as well. I figure he was out for like maybe a few weeks while his body struggled to deal with a very intense tissue transplant.
 

BEAT

LOUDSKULL
(DUDE/BRO)
Also Raru normally when you do a skin graft you just stitch it on where it makes sense, not do an elaborate geometric jigsaw puzzle design what the fuck dude.
 

Bongo

excused from moderation duty
(he/him)
Staff member
It's clearly magic. Magic has to involve an element of fanciment.
 
I can't say I particularly like most of the new story as much as BOTW but pretty much eeeeeeverything else is really doin' it for me.
 

BEAT

LOUDSKULL
(DUDE/BRO)
It's clearly magic. Magic has to involve an element of fanciment.
No Raru had a surgery robot and he was like "make the transplant scars SUPER ELABORATE" and link was like "holy shit I am in agony" and Raru was like "my dude you're gonna look so fuckin cool" and link was biting down on a piece of wood screaming
 

BEAT

LOUDSKULL
(DUDE/BRO)
Nintendo has apparently already patched several dupe/smuggling glitches.

Pour one out for the speedrunners who now have to keep their switches forever offline to preserve version 1.10
 

muteKi

Geno Cidecity
No Raru had a surgery robot and he was like "make the transplant scars SUPER ELABORATE" and link was like "holy shit I am in agony" and Raru was like "my dude you're gonna look so fuckin cool" and link was biting down on a piece of wood screaming

I think I've seen that fanart on Twitter. Wait, what surgery
 

Violentvixen

(She/Her)
Nintendo has apparently already patched several dupe/smuggling glitches.

Pour one out for the speedrunners who now have to keep their switches forever offline to preserve version 1.10
Can't you turn off auto update in the settings and just not install it for this game, but still have your other games update?

I haven't tried this but assume it would work since the game doesn't require being online to play and I would hope that if you update one game it just updates that single one. But we all know Nintendo is perpetually weird about online stuff soooo
 

Sarcasmorator

Same as I ever was
(He/him)
Honestly I barely thought about the story in BOTW and I'm barely thinking about it here either.

"Link kills a Ganon while Zelda is either imprisoned or does things offscreen" is almost every Zelda game. The characters are fun but it's like, the opposite of something like Forbidden West for me, where the story is a big part of what I'm in it for.
 

Kirin

Summon for hire
(he/him)
Hmm, my wife and I bought one cart for our two switches, but she's been playing it on hers exclusively so far while I'm still finishing off BotW. Now I'm wondering if I'll want to put the cart in mine while it's offline to avoid it getting auto-patched on the initial install... but I really have no idea how patches or avoiding them works on Switch. Not that item duping is critical or anything, but I'm kind of wishing I had an easier glitch to do it in late-game BotW right now than collecting over half a dozen multi-shot bows to do the finicky-looking lightning arrow overload thing (hell I barely have more than half a dozen bow *slots*, I put all my koroks into melee slots), and the shield-jump dupe I saw reported for TotK looks way easier.
 

Vaeran

(GRUNTING)
(he/him)
Honestly I barely thought about the story in BOTW and I'm barely thinking about it here either.

"Link kills a Ganon while Zelda is either imprisoned or does things offscreen" is almost every Zelda game. The characters are fun but it's like, the opposite of something like Forbidden West for me, where the story is a big part of what I'm in it for.

Most of BotW's story is in its flashbacks and the development of Zelda's character; everything that happens in terms of plot beats after Link is resurrected is indeed pretty standard stuff.

What I found more compelling was the atmosphere -- here's Hyrule a century after its near-total destruction and most of it still lies in ruins, with only a few scattered villages here and there and its people barely hanging on. Yiga assassins roam the land in broad daylight, you can never be sure if that rusted out Guardian on the plain will suddenly come to life and fry your ass, and even the monsters you manage to kill don't stay dead because even the moon's fucked up. Zelda's been holding everything back from the brink on her own for a hundred years and her strength is finally beginning to fail. There's a pall of despair (and yet, hope) that contrasts with the gorgeous landscape, and the sense that this is really the last slim chance for this long-suffering realm.

Am I making a meal out of chewing gum? Maybe, but BotW managed to establish a particular feel to its world that most Zelda games, magical as they are, simply don't. It's similar to the original, which also presented a vast (for the time) open world to explore, with not much in the way of human civilization to be found -- just a few scared surviving elders hiding in caves. A lot of that was probably due more to technical limitations than anything else (and of course the land is much more densely populated in Zelda II), but however it got there, it also achieved a sense of loneliness and wonder that I never quite experienced again until BotW.

TotK doesn't quite recapture that for me (nor did I expect it to), but it iterates on the previous game in really engaging ways, and I am once again interested in finding out what precisely Zelda's deal is.
 

Sarcasmorator

Same as I ever was
(He/him)
Oh no, it had plenty of atmosphere! It just wasn't a prime driver for me continuing to play, not least because you can find a lot of it in any order (not unlike TOTK), so it's more "Huh, that's neat. Oh, so that's what happened." rather than "I AM GRIPPED BY THE NARRATIVE AND MUST SEE WHAT'S NEXT"

Whereas a game like, oh, God of War Ragnarok, the gameplay is fine but I'm there for the tale. In these games I'm invested in the exploring and getting to new towers and all that.
 

Violentvixen

(She/Her)
Hmm, my wife and I bought one cart for our two switches, but she's been playing it on hers exclusively so far while I'm still finishing off BotW. Now I'm wondering if I'll want to put the cart in mine while it's offline to avoid it getting auto-patched on the initial install... but I really have no idea how patches or avoiding them works on Switch. Not that item duping is critical or anything, but I'm kind of wishing I had an easier glitch to do it in late-game BotW right now than collecting over half a dozen multi-shot bows to do the finicky-looking lightning arrow overload thing (hell I barely have more than half a dozen bow *slots*, I put all my koroks into melee slots), and the shield-jump dupe I saw reported for TotK looks way easier.
There is an option to turn auto-updating software off in the system settings although can't say if it works yet.

We bought one digital copy for my husband's Switch and I haven't played much yet since he's about to be out of town. Will probably do some this weekend just in case we accidentally forget and update it.
 

R.R. Bigman

Coolest Guy
I beat the Water Temple last night. These “dungeons” are a bit better than BotW’s, and at least they have unique bosses, if this one is anything to go by.

Between the lore of completing the Water Temple and the few geo-logs I’ve stumbled upon, it strongly appears to show a new origin for Ganondorf, meaning these most recent games must take place in a completely separate timeline. Or Nintendo truly does not give a crap and the whole timeline was just marketing for Skyward Sword.
 

Paul le Fou

24/7 lofi hip hop man to study/relax to
(He)
iirc, BotW (and therefore TotK) were basically their own contained timeline, so far in the future that it could have been the future of any branch. So I don't doubt that what it shows is just part of the Breath/Tears story and only connects through legends and cycles to the rest of the series. I also think the timeline was tied into Skyward Sword because that was the first one that was set at a specific time in the cycle (first), but was mainly their way of saying "OK get off our backs, here, is this what you wanted?"
 

Lakupo

Comes and goes with the wind
(he/him)
Finished the Lightning Temple yesterday, after finishing the Fire Temple earlier in the week.

Kind of not that impressed with the temples themselves so far; they may be less interesting than the guardian beasts? But the questlines as a whole have been solid. I like how they recontextualize or expand familiar locations while exploring the new mechanics (big rig trucker in hell for the NE phenomenon, mini musou for the SE).

But that still makes the Temples kind of disappointing capstones to the quests.
Fire Temple: I liked the idea here a lot! Interconnected floors with minecarts! What's not to like? But it felt kind of incoherent? Like, there's just enough guidance to feel like I should be doing things a certain way, but then it kind of unravels. I've finished a couple of shrines with some ramshackle solutions, and I'm cool with that, but I think climbing around the central tower on a hunt for the last thing I need is a bit sloppy.
Lightning Temple: A lot of the shrines in the area seem to be teaching some of the mechanics here, but man were these puzzles kind of basic? I guess the shrines are technically optional... while the temples are probably also... technically optional... I dunno, more of a narrative moment than mechanical, for sure. Also, to make one of the four paths to charge batteries just a "move a rock to get to it" nothing-puzzle... man, that's just a waste.

(Sorry, veering into a bit of level designer crit mode there. But some of this stuff actually makes me feel better about a dungeon I made in Cosmic Chaos that caused some confusion for streamers. Like, if Nintendo fucked up this much, then I'm doing okay with our limited timetables!)

Oh, another thing I liked about the southeast stuff: I think this is a pretty neat take on Gibdos, and it reminded me of the moth boss from Skull Woods. I liked seeing all of that merged together into a cohesive concept, plus really nailing home how important elemental attacks are this time as well.

Despite having what I assume are the two best combat tricks in the game now and getting a ton of mileage out of them, I am also feeling like I need to figure out how to unlock upgrading my armor soon, becaus I can chug defense up potions for only so long during boss fights (since multiple status effects do not stack, I tend to overwrite with some other food)
 
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Paul le Fou

24/7 lofi hip hop man to study/relax to
(He)
Just got the Master Sword (is it really a spoiler to reveal that you do in fact get the Master Sword in a Zelda game?) and while it was a cool moment, I think it's kind of a shame how they handled it, story-wise.

Having Zelda essentially sacrifice herself for the sake of charging the sword back up feels like a step backwards, especially with people's hopes for this iteration of Zelda having more agency and presence. I know those hopes were only ever unfounded, and probably ill-advised. Still, it just seems like a waste of a character, having her get lost in time, do little-to-nothing there, and then fridge herself for Link's sake. Who knows, maybe there'll be more development later in the game - I went through the geoglyphs to get it, dunno if there's some other way later - or maybe we can still "save" her at the end, again. I guess we'll always have the Age of Calamity depiction of Zelda, at least.
 
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Bongo

excused from moderation duty
(he/him)
Staff member
Credits rolled. Not that I'm done. Switch says I spent over 135 hours on it and I think it's got enough suggestions for things to keep doing left in it that I can get plenty more.

Yeah, that's an all-timer for sure. Holy moly. I've said a lot about it and I'll say more, but for an overall summation I don't know what to say.
 

Paul le Fou

24/7 lofi hip hop man to study/relax to
(He)
Finished the Lightning Temple yesterday, after finishing the Fire Temple earlier in the week.

Kind of not that impressed with the temples themselves so far; they may be less interesting than the guardian beasts? But the questlines as a whole have been solid. I like how they recontextualize or expand familiar locations while exploring the new mechanics (big rig trucker in hell for the NE phenomenon, mini musou for the SE).
I thought the Wind Temple and its lead-up were pretty fantastic, but the other three were all a bit disappointing after that.

Also, spoilers for temple NPCs: the wind temple made me think that the sages would be different than the champions' heirs from BotW, since Tulin switched in for Teba. And there was even a new character introduced in Zora's Domain who was a perfect candidate, but then nope, it was just Sidon again. That was disappointing. And then sure enough, the others were just Yunobo and Riju again. If they weren't going to get all new characters, I kinda wish they'd at least switched out Sidon for Yona(?) to keep it more balanced (2 new and 2 old), and get another female hero in there.
 

BEAT

LOUDSKULL
(DUDE/BRO)
So I decided to beat this game today. I mean it's memoral day, I have the day off, I know where ganon is, I've gotten all the main quest shit good time to end the first playthrough, right?

So I fired up the switch and got distracted by a cave, found a whole new armor set, decided to try and upgrade some armor sets, realized I needed more electric keese wings to do that, went to greudo desert, got distracted with a sidequest about the 8th Heroine, ect ect ect.

This game has so much STUFF in in you guys oh my god.
 
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