Tears of the Kingdom, Part Three

[rynling]

The scripted parts of Tears of the Kingdom - the story and the shrine puzzles - could be better, but I'm having a great time with the open-world exploration.

I love the caves beyond measure. Each of them has its own little gimmick, many of which are humorous. There's one in the hills above Kakariko Village that's so silly and adorable that I almost choked on my tea laughing.

I also really like the wells. Fairly early on, you meet a character who is obsessed with exploring every well in Hyrule. She says there are 58 of them, and she invites you to join her on her quest. I imagine many players will roll their eyes, but I was ecstatic with joy. 58 wells? For me to find and explore??? Oh happy day!!

If there had been just caves and wells, that would have been enough, but Tears of the Kingdom also has an underworld that spans the entire map of the game. I'm going to be honest and admit that what I've seen of the underworld so far is extremely scary. What I'm therefore doing is checking off shrines (to gain more health) and upgrading my armor in preparation to dive even deeper underground.

Comments

[runicmagitek]

Damn, you and me both. I know I should be looking for Zelda and finding a way to end this gloomy business, but it's just Such A Delight to wander around and reacquaint myself with this world and help Koroks reunite with their friends and poke through wells without somehow turning into Like Like food or get murdered by a sentient tree I didn't notice was creeping up behind me for the 20th time.

Also did you know you can fuse a minecart to your shield and upgrade shield surfing to shield skateboard? 10/10 would ignore the plot again 🥲

[rynling]

I did not know that!! but now I do, and my world is a richer and better place. I'm going to go try that right now, thank you!

I understand that Ganondorf is probably becoming extremely impatient as he watches from Hyrule Castle, but surely he understands that the Koroks need to be reunited with their friends through highly dubious methods of conveyance??

[lassarina]

This sounds like a delight to experience.

[rynling]

It's a mixed bag.

Tears of the Kingdom is almost overwhelmingly busy, if that makes sense. A lot of the magic of Breath of the Wild had to do with being alone in the wilderness and pushing yourself forward because you were curious about what you would see around the next bend in the road. Tears of the Kingdom feels like being given a grocery list and told to drive to the store.

I'm enjoying myself, but it's also kind of like Breath of the Wild DLC: The Game.

[lassarina]

Interesting. I find I am sometimes overwhelmed when things are too open, so I wonder if I would in fact find the grocery list soothing. (Get that dopamine~)

[rynling]

I think, to a certain extent, the sense of comfort you describe was what they were going for. In Tears of the Kingdom, you have a list of clear goals, and many of them are easy to achieve. This person wants you to bring them ten mushrooms. That person wants to bring them ten eggs. And these NPCs are usually standing right outside the place where you can get whatever they need.

I feel like Breath of the Wild was more subtle about its fetch quests. To give an example, there was that one guy in Hateno Village who wanted you to get ten grasshoppers for him, but he had a whole story about why he wanted them and why he couldn't leave his post to get them himself and why he was delusional for thinking this was a good idea in the first place. Like, there was an entire drama with multiple characters surrounding a fetch quest intended to teach you how to find a semi-rare item.

Meanwhile, Tears of the Kingdom will just have someone standing outside a cave being like, "There are mushrooms inside this cave. But I don't want to go inside the cave. I'll give you $20 if you go get me mushrooms." And more often than not, you already have the mushrooms, so you don't even need to go inside the cave.

"Lazy" isn't quite the word I'd use for what's going on with the sidequests in Tears of the Kingdom, but there's a lot of hand holding. After the brilliant subtlety of Breath of the Wild, the grocery list fetch quests feel regressive and video game-y, if that makes sense.

Then again, apparently the producer and director (Aonuma and Fujibayashi) designed Tears of the Kingdom while thinking about how overwhelmed and stressed out their sons seem to be in real life, so maybe it made sense for them to create a working model of how to set and achieve simple goals.

[lassarina]

I love when fetch quests have a whole Thing about them. FFXIV does that really well for some of them.

One thing I loved and appreciated about Xenoblade Chronicles was that you'd pick up fetch quests, and as soon as you got the requisite stuff, you could claim the rewards from the menu without having to remember which town and which NPC and what time of day. I loved it.

[rynling]

I don't know much about FFXIV, but I've been reading people talk about how good the sidequests are for the past ten years. I can totally believe it. The hunts were my favorite part of Final Fantasy XII, and it must be cool to see those types of character stories expanded over a larger world.

I just saw on Twitter this morning that FFXVI is going to be released in like two weeks. That's wild. It seems like all the top talent is still busy with FFXIV, and I wonder if the new game going to be any good.

[lassarina]

Honestly, the fact that Naoki Yoshida helmed FFXVI gives me great confidence. He cares enormously about player experience and respect for his players as a developer. When he does interviews about why he made certain choices for XIV it's very clear that he's thought very carefully about what it means. One example is that in a lot of MMOs, when you get to the end of the current story, you just spend all your time incrementally grinding for better widgets, and if you fall behind it's hard to catch up. FFXIV is built so that if you take a break, it's much easier to catch up when you come back--he has specifically said that he wants his players to have time to play and enjoy other games. Which is wild and shouldn't be!

.....also apparently there is no Day One patch for FFXVI (the delay due to "but nobody will have a PS5 so no one will buy it" was used for bug fixes and final polish instead of "Let's shove more stuff in there" scope creep, which is simply very much what I would expect from Yoshi-P.)

[rynling]

That's so wholesome and heartening to hear. Thank you for this!

Damn... maybe it's time to buy a PS5.

[lassarina]

You're welcome! I know nobody's perfect but I will automatically extend a lot of grace to Yoshi-P because ten years of FFXIV has shown that he is mostly a good egg. (He does fail sometimes. But so do we all.)

I endorse PS5, honestly. I got the disc-based one so that I could still play all my PS4 games on it, and it's great.