Another Zelda
2023-05-13
Tears of the Kingdom has just released, and as a large fan of the first game, I decided to dip a toe in again, and after 20ish hours, I’ve found myself simultaneously quite happy and quite disappointed.
The Good
I’m going to be spending a lot of time complaining about shortfalls and bizarre decisions. So allow me to say, i play a lot of this game because the overworld exploration and design is sublime. I very much want games that just let me loose and give me a thousand interesting things to do. My ideal loop is "what’s over there?", interesting traversal to get there, a familiar-but-unique challenge once i get there (maybe traversal is the challenge), and a reward that gives me more options once i’m done. This game largely does that, and i love it. I love the feel of "i’ll just checked out this obvious corner of the map with a little cliff on it" and finding myself going through a hidden snowy pass into the gerudo highlands, opening up into a desert that’s as large as hyrule. Beautiful. I want to get lost here, there’s so much to see and do.
I’ll also give credit to the disposable weapons; i’m the sort of guy who will find a reliable weapon and use it until the end of time. Forcing me to cycle through and try all the different fusions is good, and fun. The first time i beat an enemy and weld its horn onto a spear, i am pleased.
It’s also gratifying to be able to get to the sky islands and the depths below, both are welcome additions to the exterior/interior thing the first game had going on. The first time i jumped down a chasm and realized that i was going to an entire underworld (like the time i took a random nondescript elevator in elden ring and it took me to Sofria), i was very pleased. I love alternate worlds.
And finally, the magic powers are actually useful, finally. Fusion is essential (if a little boring after a while), ascend is absolutely excellent, and ultrahand has to be there i guess.
The Bad
The technical
It’s been some time since i used the Switch, and played the previous game, but i hadn’t remembered how truly awful the controls are. Nintendo reverses X and O, so that O is confirm and X is cancel, the opposite of Playstation, Xbox, and Steam. Easy enough, you can remap that. I’d also forgotten how primitive and inaccurate the gyro is, with extreme drift; calibration doesn’t help. And remember how the controller itself lags if not docked for a while? Where pressing a button or moving the stick takes an actual second – yes 1,000ms – to register? Let’s not even get into the low resolution (720p?!) and terrible framerate (30 at best, 15 usually).
But then the game itself uses bizarre controls, with a dedicated sprint button, a separate jump button (not on X, it’s on triangle), right bumper for dive mode (you don’t cancel glide to dive mode, as you might have expected, so often you’re switching between the wrong of three midair states) and the laggiest bow controls you’ll ever meet in your life (have fun letting go of the trigger and waiting an entire second – yes, 1,000ms – for the arrow to start flying). Here’s a tip, hold jump to sprint, put interact on triangle, put jump on x, when aiming a bow make the attack button fire (and releasing the trigger cancels), make dive state automatic.
And before i move on, who among us can divine how the hell blocking is supposed to work – it doesn’t auto-follow enemies when locked, it doesn’t follow either camera or movement direction, there’s some gyro control but it’s not clear how much. The shield itself is mostly useless because even if an enemy’s attack could be blocked, the shield will pretty much never face the proper direction for it, or just plain won’t count.
And indulge me, but what happened to perfect dodges? In the first game, i capped out on equipment mostly because i could perfect dodge + flurry the centaurs so consistently and easily that they were trivial. In this one, the game often performs the backflip animation, without actually giving a perfect dodge (meaning you just die after doing a perfect dodge). Bosses (world or story) often have undodgeable attacks, where you just have to sprint away (or just die, as in the case of Muldraga).
The design
Fine, the way you interface and the way it feeds back is bad, partly due to the console and probably Nintendo’s asinine adherence to legacy controls that haven’t made sense since the n64. What makes this game boring or frustrating?
The game seems to be taking a page out of Elden Ring, with strong enemies that frequently one-or-twoshot you, needlessly aggravating boss fights. For example, the sand temple boss took me about two hours – not because i didn’t know how to beat it, or hadn’t performed each stage correctly, but because every single thing in there oneshots you (or gets you to half a heart from full, necessitating spamming food, which you can’t make during the fight). It requires an annoying companion ability (where you physically run up to a bot and hit interact for her to charge up), features sections where the boss has iframes without phase change, can’t be staggered in the middle of one specific animation, or can bull-rush sideways to kill you.
I guess the Elden Ring answer is applicable here - you were supposed to grind gear in this game all about exploration, and nobody mentioned it.
The early game
Surprisingly weak. The sky starter island is nice, quite good. But they drop you to earth with no paraglider – an essential item for most of the game. At this point, you can (and i did) just run off and explore, but you’re crippled without following an excruciatingly boring main quest line to the point where you get a paraglider. It’s also not indicated that’s what you have to do; i got to reward level 2 at the pony stables, and the reward was cloth that could be turned into a paraglider at Hateno village. Thankfully, i didn’t know where that was, and didn’t make an effort to go there, because as soon as i’d done that i stumbled on the main quest path that gave me a paraglider after an hour of wasting my time running up and down an empty hillside and people reiterating things i already knew.
This can get close to softlocking you; a shrine i went into required the paraglider but didn’t stop me from going in without one. I knew what i wanted, i knew a paraglider would help, but an hour later i just had to reload a save because there was no way out of the shrine, and no paraglider.
Fast travel required
I never fast travelled in the first game, not even once (outside the mandatory one). But in this one, i had to. After descending to the depths, i did some adventuring and wanted back up. But you… can’t. There are balloons that seem like they would, but i had no piles of wood. I tried zonai fireplaces (not fire, evidently), burning my wooden weapons, lighting pine cones, attaching flame spitters to shields, everything i could think of. Sure, the balloon went up. But it didn’t even reach the cavern ceiling. Mission failed. The only way out was to fast travel – not great for a game all about traversal options and exploration.
The Overrated
People praise fusion and ultrahand, but they’re not nearly so deep as it’s said. Ultrahand is the sort of thing that crafting-survival games have had for over a decade now, and this implementation isn’t all that compelling. Sure, there’s some cool machines, but you rarely actually use them. Quick, tell me a use for the hover block that didn’t involve the sand temple. Tell me a time you found a real use for the wing.
Fusion too finds itself a bit of a victim. Almost nothing has an interesting effect, everything boils down to +dmg. Every now and then you might make a fire wand, or an ice wand, out of the appropriate rock and a spare part, but you rarely use it. Most of the time, you’re cycling through the same spears and swords you’ve always used, slapping a lizalfo or bokoblin horn onto it to turn it into a "reaper" that lasts all of one enemy.
Indulge me, but Dark Cloud (2) had a fascinating "synthesis" system, where you used items from your inventory as socketable gems, each with its own stat bonuses. And instead of the character levelling up, the weapon gained XP – each level, it would consume the socketed items into itself, and its stats would raise all the more.
I know Zelda has taken the tact of disposable items to encourage experimentation, but what’s the point if there is no experiment to run? We’ve all slapped an explosive barrel to a boomerang. We’ve all used the eyeball to make a homing arrow. Where’s the interesting stuff? Fusion is exciting on the surface, but in practice it’s… just a treadmill of applying stats to disposable items.
