Rynling R&D

I need to get better at expressing “negative” opinions, so please have a few more controversial takes:

(d) Tears of the Kingdom isn’t a good game, but it isn’t such a bad game either. It’s a decent handheld title that’s useful for occupying a fifteen-minute bus ride. I kind of wish Tears of the Kingdom didn’t exist, but there are worse Zelda games.

(e) The Marvel superhero movies are American fascist propaganda. I know this is a caricature of a liberal brainrot opinion, but it’s true. Ironically, those movies are way too long and extremely boring.

(f) I still resent the Barbie movie for representing Los Angeles as being full of white people and then making fun of the one character who’s trying to learn Spanish.

(g) The 1984 Ghostbusters movie isn’t that good. It’s actually kind of painful to watch. The 2016 remake is infinitely better, and I’m not just saying that because “it has girls.”

(h) FromSoft games would be objectively better if they were less difficult. They can still be difficult and punishing, of course. But FromSoft should really consider adjusting the number sliders just a little.

I was afraid that, after I played Disco Elysium, it would spoil me for other games.

And now, lo and behold, I cannot fucking deal with the writing in Oxenfree II.

I mean listen. The writing in Tears of the Kingdom is uncomfortably uneven. There's some decent writing in the game, but it's in weird places, and maybe it's not where it should be. Still, Tears of the Kingdom has other things going for it. For example, to reunite a Korok with its friend, I recently built a rocket-powered aircraft carrier and sailed it across half a continent while dressed like an Aztec prince. That was fun.

But all Oxenfree II has is writing. If the characters are flat and boring and the story is nonsensical and filled with plot holes, what am I even doing here?

I'll finish Oxenfree II so I can critique it properly, but man. I just wish the standard of writing for video games were a bit higher.

Photos of the Kingdom: Filling the Stable Frames
https://www.reddit.com/r/zelda/comments/13w3sz2/totk_photos_of_the_kingdom_filling_the_stable/

At each of the stables in Tears of the Kingdom, the proprietor will ask you to take a photo to fill a large frame on the wall. With one tricky exception, most of their requests make perfect sense, and it's fun to run around finding the perfect shot of each landmark. Your reward for completing the individual photo quests is a low-level type of food, and your reward for completing the entire sequence is five slices of carrot cake. This isn't an interesting or useful quest unless you play Tears of the Kingdom primarily as a wildlife photography simulator. That is what I do, and that is why I love this series of sidequests.

What this person on Reddit has done is to create a short travelogue of their adventures in stable frame photography. It probably won't make sense to anyone who hasn't played the game, but I really enjoyed reading it. Video game travelogues are the best.

Given that life is short and each of us only has so many days on this earth, I decided to go ahead and write my story about Calip and Tauro from Tears of the Kingdom. I've been having trouble writing for the past week, but then lo and behold, suddenly words appear. It's actually kind of fun to write about fantasy academia.

In real-life academia, most people either have a drinking problem or are taking so many pills that alcohol would probably kill them. It's the sort of profession where people tend to have multiple therapists. I know this sounds funny, but it's not a joke.

Instead of the reality of what academia is, it's nice to indulge in a fantasy of what I thought it would be when I was younger. The "fantasy" isn't so much magic shrines and floating islands, but rather the idea that Calip and Tauro would actually have enough mutual respect that they wouldn't try to kill one another after every single staff meeting.

I'm thinking about applying to Blood Moon Rising, a Legend of Zelda horror zine (on Twitter here). I've been feeling very shy and anxious about my writing recently and sort of want to disappear into a hole, so I'm not sure if I'll actually apply, but I put together some pitches.

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TLDR: I ship Calip and Tauro. The two of them are my ideal m/m dynamic; and, after doing the Thunderhead Isles quest to enter the fifth dungeon, I'm 99% certain that Tauro is canonically supposed to be in love with Calip (who unfortunately only cares about research). These two characters are so precious to me that I would gladly commission fanfic of them, but I'm afraid that I'm probably one of the only people in the Legend of Zelda fandom who can properly write "I would prefer for you to call me Dr." Calip. Bless his heart.

I eventually want to start writing about things I like in Tears of the Kingdom, but I have one last complaint I need to get off my chest: I do not like the weapon fusion mechanic.

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I’m playing Tears of the Kingdom as a wildlife photography simulator, so this doesn’t bother me as much as it could, but it’s still a disappointment not to be able to enjoy basic combat.

The fire temple is a minecart hell level. This is exacerbated by:

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This is what I mean when I say Tears of the Kingdom feels like homework. I don't see how this is supposed to be fun.

Tears of the Kingdom is a remarkably unbalanced game. One of the more annoying sources of this lack of balance is how quickly your bows and weapons break. To give an example, a sword that had an attack power of 12 and took 25 hits to break in Breath of the Wild now has an attack power of 6 and takes 15 hits to break. If you attach something to the sword to give it a greater attack power, the durability will decrease, meaning that it will break in 7 to 10 hits. Likewise, if you attach anything to your arrows, the durability of your bow will decrease substantially. This is especially annoying when the things you attach to your arrows are necessary for environmental navigation (to create light in dark places, for example).

If you stay on the beaten path and do your chores like a good little boy, this is not a problem. If you want to go exploring, however, you're shit out of luck.

I therefore decided to go ahead and do the fire temple, as the ability you get there helps you break rocks and other obstacles "for free." As I wrote earlier, the scenario for this temple bothers me. Essentially, Yunobo the Goron has invented capitalism, but none of the other Gorons wants to work for a corporation. Your job is to get the fat lazy Gorons off their fat lazy asses and force them into a situation in which they're alienated from their labor.

It turns out that Yunobo is being possessed by The Evil Ganon™, who is controlling him by means of a totally sweet luchador mask. (Seriously, I fucking love that mask.) After you have a silly little battle, Yunobo's mask breaks, and he returns to normal. "Normal" means that he's still the CEO of a corporation, of course, but now he's "good."

So I guess, in This Year of Our Lord 2023, we are back to the same bullshit where capitalism is divided between "good capitalism," which is enabled by smart and hardworking individuals, and "bad capitalism," which is a sneaky plot of people who look like this:

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I should probably go ahead and do a dungeon, but every story cutscene in Tears of the Kingdom feels like a punishment. Mostly I've been hanging out and doing sidequests at the stables, which are a bit more my speed.

I finally went down to Lurelin, which is a chill and friendly village on the beach. This was one of my favorite locations in Breath of the Wild, and I had a good time there in Tears of the Kingdom as well. Lurelin was destroyed during a pirate attack, and your job is to help Bolson the contractor rebuild the village houses. You do this by chopping down trees and using the Ultrahand ability to move the lumber.

I really enjoyed the Lurelin set of sidequests. It's fun to feel like you're actually dealing with a real-world issue - helping to rebuild houses destroyed in a disaster - and I appreciate that Link's magical abilities have practical applications.

I also went up to the Great Plateau, where two nostalgic locations from Breath of the Wild have been occupied by the Yiga Clan. The Yiga Clan is unapologetically goofy, and I love them. I love them so much.

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Like I wrote earlier, I’m really enjoying the exploration elements of Tears of the Kingdom, but the writing could use some work. I’m going to take a break from the story and go back down into The Depths. I might even start exploring some sky islands.