Up to 47 Shrines and started the Fire Temple. Yunobo's ability is my favorite, you can just bowl enemies.

 

I had to take a break from the Fire Temple last night. I found it very frustrating particularly how easy it is to fall out of the carts when trying to aim Yunobo.

 

Got the Master Sword today. Time to start the dungeons.

 

Holy smokes I just got the

Spoiler

sword from Skyward Sword! Nice. Don’t sleep on those Goddess spring statue quests!

 

So Aonuma just stated that the entire last year and two months was spent purely on polish and QA, and that the game was feature and content complete in March 2022.

Hey, other AAA devs and publishers... I know it's expensive but... if you're wondering why a 30 fps 500p game on 7+ year old hardware is running circles around you and setting sales records... it's because of this. Do this. Thank-you

Signed,
Person who likes finished games.

 

Considering how the entire game turned out, I’d say the 6 year wait was completely worth it.

 

An exploration note for anyone who hasn't figured it out yet: if a cave icon doesn't have a check mark, there's still a certain type of collectible in it.

Spoiler

Finished the temples. I would rank them from best to worst:
Gerudo (pretty good)
Goron (good)
Rito (okay)
Zora (not great)

Still not anywhere near as good as traditional 3D Zelda dungeons in my opinion. Similar to the Divine Beasts, the barebones four or five puzzles feel more like a minidungeon, not a full dungeon, to me. The bosses were definite improvements over BotW, though.

I've done 110 shrines. So I've got max stamina and more than half health at this point.

Had the Master Sword for a good while. I really don't like the outcome of its story in-game. Zelda turned into a dragon to bathe it in divine power for who knows how many centuries or millennia. And it's basically just reset to how it was in BotW (same base attack power, still breakable).

Spoiler: Honest thoughts on the game so far

After around 70 hours of play, I still have the same main criticism of this game as I did in BotW: it takes too long to do anything or get anywhere because the size of everything is massively bloated relative to the actual meaningful content (in other words, the game is not content-dense in my opinion). Yes, there's trees, pick ups, and enemies relatively often, but none of them actually matter because of how they're almost always optional and/or actively use more important resources than you would get.

Making vehicles helps a bit, but the added costs of additional systems and resources (batteries, zonaite, finding or using the pieces) to juggle for the few minutes you'll usually have/use a vehicle severely hampers their usability/viability for a large portion of the game. Or at least it did for me.

As I said before, the meaningful content itself is generally improved. Sidequests are so much better than they were in BotW. And there's a lot of them (I'm probably not done with half of them). While I still hate durability (as I have in every game I've played that has it, going back to at least the first localized Fire Emblem game), the fusing mechanic at least makes some weapons less useless.

I can't say I'm a fan of the Depths, though. It's a second giant area that's even less content-dense than the main map, with an annoying health-sapping mechanic added on that makes me even less inclined to fight anything than usual.

The story I would probably say is better than BotW. However, it once again suffers from the same problem of setting the most exciting parts in the past, and thus having no player agency. And so they're relegated to just "things that happened" rather than "things you made happen".

With regards to spending a full year on QA... yeah, I'm not so sure that's a good thing overall. If they needed a full year to make sure everything they wanted in the game actually made it in, I could understand that pretty easily. But taking a full year just to make sure everything that's already in the game actually works? And for a game that has a lot of reused content from the previous one to begin with? That's a bit of a hard sell for me. I'm glad they put in the effort to make sure things work as well as they do, but if you have to spend a year only on making sure the new features don't break everything it kind of seems like those features might not have been worth it from a development standpoint.

 

Since I never played BoTW this is an all new experience for me and really enjoying it.

 

Just on this one point, I think the real challenge here is the amount of emergent player behavior the mechanics they've implemented generate, and optimization owing to the big one in particular (Ultrahand.)

When you essentially tell players they can glue a ridiculous number of objects together however they want, and then allow that to function intuitively within the game's physics engine, that's basically a recipe for jank and gamebreaking behavior. Setting that capability loose in an open world where you don't want people to have unlimited traversal freedom but do want them to feel like they do, is pretty crazy. I can't even begin to imagine how much playtesting and revision was required for this system to work with the level of polish it has.

And on the optimization side, there's a lot going on physically that I didn't even notice at first that I imagine had to be a huge headache. I would expect that as in most games that allow building of objects that are physics-enabled, once things are pieced together they become a single composite with its own physics. They didn't do that in this case though, apparently.

Instead, each component retains some sort of individual physics values evidently, so that they can do things like flex and bend with weight and length at the connection points. I can't even begin to fathom how they got all this to run even as well as it does, frankly. It's almost as if at every opportunity to do things the simple way, they chose the more complex and impressive (but challenging) route instead.

I'm just an idiot gamer on the internet, but even based on what I do know, I can definitely see this being a massive QA process.

 

Imagine the kind of Pokemon game we’d get with this kind of attention.

 

Holy shit I was exploring Gerudo and King Ghidorah was on the top of a mountain!

 

I’m barely off the sky island but helped my Son navigate the fire temple the other day. It’s a little tricky but not too hard.

 

Would be great, however that would force TPCI to put everything on hold and push every other product back to accommodate.

Which is never going to happen.

Nintendo games can do that because they aren't the key factor for yearly product releases like cards, merchandise and anime.

 

Rolled credits the other night. Sooner than I wanted (later to most) because spoilers started popping up for me on my social media/YT feeds.

Anyways, loved the story very much. Gotta say, this Link, for me is hands down THE LINK. The hero of all the heroes(?). Link from LttP/ALBW/LA/Oracles has been pretty much the definitive Link for me, but the TotK story has pretty much dethroned that Link.

For those that got the Collector's Edition.

Spoiler

They should've given us Secret Stones instead of pins. I know it'd be a spoiler when it came to promo photos though, but I know some CE had spoiler warnings like "don't open until you've beaten the game

SPOILER for those that haven't beaten the game yet, I edited this together because it reminded me of a certain anime (NOT THAT KIND OF ANIME!)

Spoiler

 

To be nit picky nerd but ALBW Link isn’t LTTP Link. ALBW Link is LTTP Link’s grandson. But I agree that LTTP Link was my definitive idea of Link. BOTW Link is awesome and I would be open to see him in another game outside of Hyrule this time.

 

Right, if it could happen it would have ages ago, but it’s fun (and depressing) to imagine a Pokemon game as polished as this.  

 

If Aonuma is going to keep using the BOTW/TOTK blueprint for the next installment, then I honestly do want to see a new era (doesn't need to be a sequel) of Hyrule modernized by the combined implementation of Shiekah and Zonia technology within their societies.

We pretty much are seeing an Industrial Revolution to some degree in TotK with not only beginning use of re-engineering said technology to be used for other purposes, but also the creation of rudimentary machinery for travel and assistance.

As I've said before we could see the concept of alien invasion brought back. Have the staple of domains being controlled in some way by these invaders or take it a step further and have Link hope back and forth between dimensions/planets/time to solve environmental puzzles and exploration. You can't cross the river? Jump forward in time to when a bridge is built or the water is frozen over by ice. Etc, etc.

Ritos could have mobile flying cities, we could travel in a vehicle to the underwater cities of the Zora, the Gorons have revolutionized their mining operations into a industrial metropolis built into Death Mountain. Gerudos could be in an electrical powered utopia and so on.

But it also made me think of this old concept I saw in College. Even as Link and more fleshed out, I think this is the way to go. Even so, a game where maybe the Tri Force is swapped around the main Trio would also be an interesting take.

Dresden Codak

 

Could be interesting, except remove the Codak part. Fuck that guy.

 

Finally got the last Dragon Tear and the Master Sword last night. Still haven't finished the Fire Temple because I keep getting distracted by shrines and skytowers.

 

So I finally finished the Fire Temple, which was fine but I lost the Master Sword and freaked out and had to fight the boss again from a prior save. Only later did I realize it does this during cool down