You made this thread before, or this is just a botted OP.
Fuck off.

>>739548207
No. I was hyped for botw and it was a huge dissapointment totk was just more of the same.

>>739548207
I actually saw the red flags during this gameplay demonstration. The trailers themselves were hype, tho
BotW >>> TotK

>>739549985
acquire taste

>>739548207
>huge Zelda fan
>see trailer
>wow this is nothing like Zelda
>see more footage
>this will be so bad I have no interest in playing it
>game releases
>shill campaign so massive it enters the realm of sony astroturfed hollywood wannabes
>get a switch for octopath
>fall for all the shilling and get botw too
>drop it 1 hour after the first "dungeon" when I could not lie to myself anymore that this is a Zelda game
Not a single new Zelda game in a decade man. At least LA remake improved the game.

>>739550004
The second NoA showed the Wii U gameplay in 2016 and hard-sold the audience on "So this is a Shrine, they're mini-dungeons. There are 120 of these" I lost interest immediately, and just hoped. like other shitty Open Worlds I was growing sick of, that I would be able to beeline it and have a great Zelda game with main dungeons and a nice story, and some Open World Moments along the way.
I didn't get that game. I just got "Zelda slopfest with 120 Discount Dungeons and 4 Indie Game Dungeons and a shit story"
BotW is a bad game, a bad Zelda game, and just a so-so Open World game.

BotW is a 9/10
TotK was a 7/10
You may not like it, but this is the truth.

I'm having a blast

OG best zelda is TP

>>739550436
I was referring to TotK's gameplay, BotW's gameplay had me hooked from the demo booth I played

>>739550438
You only think that because BotW gave you an inflated first impression based on what the buzz around the industry was about it.
In reality, both are 7/10 and there's nothing significantly better or worse about one or the other. BotW was a game people liked because they love the idea in their head of what they were playing more than what the content of the game actually was, and TotK is the hungover game where they realize it wasn't actually such an amazing experience, but only because it's the second time they realize that.

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>>739548207
BOTW came out when I was 10 years old

>>739548207
I was hyped after the initial reveal trailer. Every subsequent trailer and gameplay reveal reduced my hype to the point that I didn't bother buying the game in the end.

>>739550538
>You only think that because BotW gave you an inflated first impression based on what the buzz around the industry was about it.
Not really, see >>739550519
I love BotW because I love its gameplay, but TotK plays like shit. I have even replayed BotW after having played through TotK and BotW is still the better experience. TotK's design balance is terrible and its puzzles are so easy it's an absolute joke. They should have created a new overworld for TotK that was designed for the Ultrahand mechanic.

>>739550519
Over time I also prefer BotW a bit more, but I don't think either gameplay is fundamentally better or worse. I think it's a shame that the construction and weapon-fuse mechanics is what it took to convince BotW fanatics that it isn't actually a good foundation.
A lot of people needlessly complained and nitpicked things about BotW while believing it was this "Open World Masterpiece" not knowing that every balancing issue was part of the game's entire design philosophy, like the way it does scarcity with weapons breaking, which forces the player to think on their feet and take a spontaneous trek up the nearby hill to look for weapons, to constantly keep them inside the "gameplay loop". People would complain about this like an oversight or a "problem", not understanding that everything was done that way on purpose, and by saying BotW is a fantastic game, Team Fujibayashi only got ego-boosted into thinking "We should do more of this", and that's what TotK is.

By not being properly critical of the foundational structure, you get from BotW to TotK. Had people just been honest and said like "This has potential. It's a 7/10 but there's potential" Nintendo would've given BotW a critical look and made a properly Open World Zelda, but because 40 million people treated it like a second coming of Minecraft, and simultaneously awarding it 10/10 in that esteemed "Zelda games are masterpieces" clout, we just got more "Zelda, but it's actually Minecraft now."

>>739550519
>game good
>game but better BAD

>>739550704
>game good
>more game BAD

>>739550642
>I love BotW because I love its gameplay, but TotK plays like shit
I've beaten both games fully twice, and while I do ultimately prefer BotW at the end it's like Phantom Hourglass vs Spirit Tracks for me. There's things TotK obviously does better that should make it the overall best game, but there is a simplicity and focus to BotW that makes it the better vibe-game. But ultimately I can't overlook that they're 8/10 experiences at best. They don't feel like "masterpieces" to me. I also wouldn't give something like Mario 64 a 10/10 even though it's in my top 5 of all time, because to me the critical review of a game is about a lot more than just "having fun with it." These games could have been extremely fun and award creative thinking, but also be masterpieces that have a thematically deep stories (like several Zelda games have), clever and in-depth dungeons, while ALSO having this Bing Bing Wahoo take on Open World, but instead both games feel like tech demos for Nintendo becoming fascinated with Minecraft and Survival Sims and losing focus on applying it to Zelda, so I just feel like these are such "experiment" games. And I think the direct comparison between the two is pretty minimal, even if I prefer BotW.

>>739548207
WHY DID SHIT STILL HAVE TO BE BREAKABLE
WHY DOES SWORD FIGHTING SUCK DICK
WHY IS THE WORLD SO BIG YET SO EMPTY
WHY DID YOU BETRAY ME

>>739550704
>>739550750
I could write an essay about the things TotK gets wrong from BotW's foundation so don't tempt me, but as a brief overview
>fusion UI is utterly abysmal and you'll use it A LOT
>ultrahand & recall are poorly balanced, trivializing most puzzles
>while thematically better, its dungeons have worse gameplay
>game design has obvious conflicts, especially with the zonai tech
>broken immersion with ugly zonai rocks everywhere
>bloated upgrade path
>currency systems within currency systems
>the depths are an absolute joke
>the sky islands are an absolute joke (and clearly dialled way back from what we first saw)
I could go on. TotK has some strengths over BotW, I enjoy the caves and some of the wells they added, but the rest of the game is so inferior to BotW it's not even funny. It worries me as between TotK and EoW they clearly did not learn why people liked BotW so much in the first place.

>>739550798
A really good game requires editorial and yeah, just piling on content to extend it doesn't make it better and better. Having too much of a good thing is not a recipe for a masterpiece. Being selective about what is in the game and what isn't in the game, is how you create an experience people think about for years afterwards. And BotW is not it. It has great emergent moments that I remember for how I had gotten myself there, but it's not enough to give it this feeling of an amazing "never-been-done-before" moment in games. It felt like Skyrim but where everything is more fun and playable, but it's still just Skyrim where I'm always wondering how long I'll keep playing before I wanna stop, and not the feeling I'd get with higher tier games of "I just wanna see what happens when I get there" and then being blown away by certain moments as you turn the pages in whatever the developers had designed for me.

The world itself in BotW feels way too museum-like. It's just this giant sculpture that you walk around on. Nothing truly amazing is found anywhere.

realeasing it on the switch 1 was a huge mistake
they could have tuned it up nicely if they just waited a year

>>739550820
>at the end it's like Phantom Hourglass vs Spirit Tracks for me.
PH is utterly terrible tho. It's barely a 6.5/10 game. It was so awful I never bothered playing spirit tracks (although a friend tried to convince me it's better), I got sick of the temple of the ocean king.

>>739550971
TotK's biggest problem is that it became a bloated design mess so I really don't think it would've helped much.

>>739550881
the ui got bloated, but most of your greentexts are bullshit
ultrahand and recall are perfectly balanced
the dungeons are a lot better involving an ability you receive to solve puzzles
there are no conflicts with the game's design, none
you might as well be complaining about how ugly Botw was originally
Totk is not the first Zelda game to feature multiple currencies
the depths is a very interesting place that props up the game
the sky islands are also incredibly interesting being akin to fully seamless grottos of previous games
I could go on. Totk is the strongest entry in the franchise, and alongside Botw they represent the franchise at its peak.

>>739550915
>The world itself in BotW feels way too museum-like. It's just this giant sculpture that you walk around on. Nothing truly amazing is found anywhere.
You say this like it's a negative when in my view that is unironic kino of the highest order. It's the same reason why I love Outer Wilds so much.

>>739550915
acquire taste

>>739550881
Basic gist of what you said is that TotK stretches systems beyond their natural limits based on how BotW was meant to play, and I somewhat agree. The weapons UI was never meant to expand for more than 16 slots, and TotK doubling down makes it clear that the entire UI makes the game worse for every additional slot you add to it, because you spend so much time pausing and scrolling that it defeats the purpose of it even being a "live-pause quick select" thing.

But for me this is so pedantic and minute that there's much more fundmanetal and bigger issues I'd rather criticique, like the shit-tier stories in both games when Zelda doesn't NEED to have bad stories, and actually didn't in the past, or the complete lack of something truly impressive to find by exploring and sightseeing. Seeing prefabs repeated just as much as any other game in the Open World genre single handedly made it feel like a failed experiment to me, because the Open World genre is often viewed as a nut that's yet to be properly cracked, and critics claiming BotW was it is not it to me, because then I'd play it, and find that it succumbs to the same quantity/size/bloat issues as all other Open World attempts: It repeats itself more than I'm willing to forgive, and ideally an Open World game should not even do that once.

The dream of an Open World game for me is one where there's genuine cities you can find that have their own little story arcs you go through that feel like "moments" in the game, and that there are truly deep networks of cavern systems and evil antagonist characters found just by reaching certain places in a map, which accumulatively tells like an entire saga of stories alongside just being fun game-loops in an Open World. To take the Zelda-campaign and convert it to Open World, so instead of 10 linear beats in Skyward Sword, it's 30 modular beats you find or not in Open World, but that are just as deep, and there's an Open World boss roaming the map autonomously etc.

>>739550982
Sure jan. But to me BotW is comparable to PH, while former 3D Zeldas are more comparable to each other or ALttP as far as 2D games go. BotW is in an entire league below other Zelda games, because it has such a shallowness to it.

>>739550915
Truke that Nintendo kids simply can't deal with

>>739551096
>You say this like it's a negative when in my view that is unironic kino of the highest order. It's the same reason why I love Outer Wilds so much.
I know that's who it appeals to but Outer Wilds is an experience that unfolds and expands upon itself to go deeper and deeper, and I think BotW is not.

BotW is the quintessential "Wide as an ocean; shallow like a puddle" and being a ZELDA Open World it isn't exempt from that, and it frustrates me because the critical reception is trying to suggest that it somehow surpassed this Open World problem, when in my experience it exactly doesn't.

>>739548207
>talks about TotK
>posts BotW pic
For what purpose.
Anyway, I wasn't "hyped" so much as cautiously optimistic, hoping TotK to be to BotW what MM was to OoT. Turned out to not be the case: TotK was a 70 dollar DLC hardly justifying its existence.

>>739551240
>Truke that Nintendo kids simply can't deal with
I'm a nintendo kid. The problem is the equivalent to Disney Adults (millenials who never bought anything but Nintendo) and Zoomers being fed by nothing but Survivalslop and games with the idea that "more content = always better"

Like no wonder they think this shit is gold when they were playing Assassin's Creed as their first exposure to gaming.

>>739551156
The stories are good, it's just possible to be experienced outside chronological order which isn't to everyone's preference. There's a metric fuck ton of cool and unique stuff to find in the game. One huge component everyone seems to overlook are the auto build schema. They operate exactly like dungeon items in previous games, providing a lot of utility and adding to Link's repertoire of abilities. Every Zelda game has repetitive side content, and it's been bizarre to see people chalk it up to the genre of open world having a ruinous affect on the series. Zelda games already did the things Botw and Totk do to a much larger volume than previously. It's just that these are the biggest Zelda games ever. These games are innovative and revolutionary as fuck, and the greatest Zelda games ever.

>>739551085
>ultrahand and recall are perfectly balanced
Stopped reading right there.
There are MULTIPLE shrines in the game that are trivialized instantly using recall. I've been replaying the game this week so this have encountered a couple of them already. There's a shrine that launches an orb to the other end with the intention that you'll fight constructs to retreive it, but you can just recall and skip the entire thing. There's a shrine with a large ball you need to build to bring it up a ledge, but you can just move the ball up and use recall to drag it other to skip that entire puzzle. I could go on. In no way is this well balanced, the cheese you can do with recall is immense and it's entirely because it also recalls objects you dragged around with your ultrahand arm. Same applies to just about every signpost puzzle btw.
>>739551202
>BotW is in an entire league below other Zelda games
lol okay bucko
>>739551248
I'm not going to pretend BotW has stellar writing, however its story does unfold over the course of the game. It's easy to forget now as it's been almost a decade since it released and everyone knows the plot by now, but it was a legitimate mystery at the time the game released over why Link starts on the great plateau and how the events went down preceding him being there. There's also several areas in the game that are a nice surprise to stumble upon when playing blind as intended, namely lurelin village, eventide island, and the tarrey town quest. Outer Wilds gave me a similar feeling just in a tighter package.

>>739551398
>Stopped reading right there.
then I wont read your shit

>>739551434
I accept your concession then.

If you aren't going to read what I write then we're done, retard.

>played and finished ALttP, OoT, MC, ST, FSA, TP and BoTW
>BoTW is my favorite Zelda

I wasn't super duper hyped by the trailer, though. It looked cool but I actually don't usually do the "follow news of a game and get hyped before it releases" thing. I'll watch the "general" directs and that's about it mostly.

>>739551484
Make a valid point first and I'll consider it.
I provided multiple examples from the game to support my point, you made no such effort at all and your "argument" just boiled down to
>nuh uh!

>>739551391
>The stories are good
They have the subtlety of a sledgehammer and terrible dramaturgia, and they don't escalate well. They're bad stories, even for Zelda. Arguably better than later Zeldas like Skyward Sword but that really isn't saying much.
They're bad in the sense that the game consistently feels more thought-provoking whenever you're not watching a story cutscene than it does when you do, and even the NPC dialogue flavor-text drags this game's writing down more than other Zelda games would. There's a lack of intention of subtext in it, and more just "plain as day" face value meaning to anything. The games have messages but they're spoonfed and overdelivered by just following the basic story. When you hear the grandiose "LEGEND OF ZELDA" orchestral motif at the end I felt nothing.

>>739550704
Fujibayashi did not get egoboosted into thinking that they needed more of the same, he got a stay of execution, because TotK was never a sequel to BotW, it was the game he wasted years developing. BotW was a placeholder title that got shoved out for the Switch launch using assets that they had already finished a year or two prior to release.

>>739551557
NTA but their stories are fine just poorly executed (especially in TotK's case, its cutscene are terrible)

>>739551745
*cutscenes

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>>739551398
> its story does unfold over the course of the game.
If you mean that I have to expressly avoid triggering the story so it isn't over 90 hours ahead of me actually completing the rest of the game's content, then yeah, I guess it does unfold.
But I don't think I have ever played a video game before BotW where I'm actively trying to savor the story for myself because it's telegraphed so hard ahead of time where the story is, and how artificial it is to trigger it. I felt like I was trying to avoid completing it and making an effort out of "constructing the narrative for my pacing" only to do it and get really disappointed there wasn't more to it, and pacing it so far apart due to the actual gameplay, that I found myself disinterested in the characters once their scenes played.

But that's also just because if you watch the story closely, any character who isn't Zelda herself (or Rauru... ugh!) are just complete cartboard cutouts of a character. The Sages in OoT have very brief roles but even they have more emotional weight associated than the fucking Champions playing out like they're an actor's variety reel, because the team obsessed over their designs more than what their stories were. The champions overglorified dogwater. The fact that they needed the Koei Tecmo Warriors writing team to make anything out of them, and actually made them entertaining in the Age of... spinoffs is a travesty. Why are they not having their greatest scenes in the actual game that is trying to be the "masterpiece" experience, but the shits & giggles spinoff title? They don't have to do it that way, and I don't think it happens that way on purpose, but because the Zelda team has lost their grip on what a good narrative is under Daiki Iwamoto's takeover of the story direction.

>>739550704
>every balancing issue was part of the game's entire design philosophy, like the way it does scarcity with weapons breaking, which forces the player to think on their feet and take a spontaneous trek up the nearby hill to look for weapons
The actual problem was that this stops being a thing within about 2 hours of gameplay. There's no weapon scarcity at all and you end up with an inventory full of good weapons in no time, at which point the durability system just becomes a pointless nuisance that does nothing but force you to pause combat for two seconds sometimes to get a new weapon out when one breaks. The combat shrines in particular completely fuck this aspect of the game with the Guardian weapon drops.

>>739551791
You need enemy resources for various things if you care about side-quests or if you're running out of resources like Wood, in which case you do find yourself spontaneously using up your weapons and then continually fight to maintain equally accumulated high-tier weapons from new enemies, so in that sense they succesfully made a non-RPG that awards a sort of "level" system.
And I believe the games would be outright snoozefests if you got your weapons in 2 hours and never lose any of it. But I also think the entire concept needs to go, and instead give us something closer to Ocarina of Time but where there's like 10 types of Biggoron Swords, most of which can break, but then you can find and trade-quest your way to the "real ones" and each corner of the map has a rare unique sword or axe that you feel like is part of the "journey" of going around the entire map. Especially if they made a labyrinthine optional dungeon, like a true 3D Zelda Dungeon, and gave us a unique perma-weapon, and then have some lore associated with it that enhances the meaning of the main story in a Majora's Mask kind of way.

>>739551790
>If you mean that I have to expressly avoid triggering the story so it isn't over 90 hours ahead of me actually completing the rest of the game's content,
I meant that in the sense that you learn about the story over the course of the main quest, which is the main game. Obviously collecting 900 korok seeds has nothing to do with the main game, same with all the other optional content in BotW so I'm not even sure why you'd argue over this. There's a reason the events immediately preceding Link's death are saved as the final memory you unlock, regardless of the order you unlocked the other memories, and it works better for storytelling compared to when TotK tried to pull the same move. Also Rauru isn't in BotW.

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>>739548207
I really liked this game.
Idk why /v/ obsessed over it 24/7 tho.

>>739552009
BotW is fantastic but I didn't like TotK

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>>739552025
totk was great

>>739552104
TotK is technically great but I still did not like it

>>739551745
The PLOTs are okay, but the stories are not. There's a lot of cinematic emphasis at the end of TotK as if they meant for this to be a "classic" finale like OoT, where it gets all mystical and ethereal and emotional, and there's callbacks like the touching of hands... but it doesn't tell a STORY unlike OoT, where there is a real message within it. OoT felt like it had a genuine subversion of the classical fantasy narrative it was seemingly nothing more than, just by Zelda explaining the triforce before the finale, and then with the finale having her play the ocarina to make Link a child again, where you're left to contemplate on what Link actually gained by going through this adventure, because he ended up back where he started, but having experienced the journey as we did, and realizing he doesn't belong to the Kokiri, he doesn't belong in the heroic destiny where he met Ruto or Darunia, or even Zelda, but he's "free" to live out his childhood now.

And similarly I'd say WW had a similar message, because the world above is ostracized from the "old Zelda world" and the game is trying all along to suggest that "traditions" must never take over the innocence of youth, which Ganon and the King were guilty of (a commentary on being old vs being young IMO)

Like these are STORIES. I see something about coming of life in Zelda BotW maybe but as you say, it's cheesy and on the nose and just kind of bad, but in TotK I don't know what the moral is. Like the DS games they feel like a bunch of highfaluting "epicness" that has no universal application when they're over. But a lot of older Zeldas felt like Nintendo was speaking to their audience through the game's narrative.

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You already made this thread

>>739552162
I think we mostly agree here as far as BotW and TotK's narrative goes. I feel BotW executed it better than its sequel, but even then the plot is conceptually more interesting than the execution we got in the game (which the DLC and spinoff games added to, but the character development of the BotW champions really should've been base game content IMO), I feel they could've made BotW's story great with just a few narrative tweaks and adding more characterization to the champions as there was potential there that wasn't realized properly. Urbosa and Mipha are the most fleshed-out champions in that game and even then going off BotW alone you barely know anything about them as people. Daruk meanwhile has nothing and Revali is a glorified Falco archetype.

>>739550564
Damn, and there won't be another new Zelda game until you are 30.

>>739548207
I didn't like BotW or TotK. I think the Zelda series has always been horribly overrated, and paint-by-numbers open world garbage does not improve it.

>>739552425
BotW is executed better, but it's still a 5/10 narrative in every sense.
Zelda's issue is not that clear, the stakes don't feel as high as they're supposed to, the supporting characters are flanderized vignettes, and the overcoming of the conflict is kind of random.
Then the present-day narrative is about as undramatic as it could possibly have been, with the tone never underscoring properly how world-ending the threat is, and the finale feels like Link and Zelda are in their own world against Ganondorf just as badly as TP, but without the emotional stakes of having been on an evolving adventure with a companion like Midna.

So overall the story is just shit imo.

>>739554662
>Zelda's issue is not that clear
seemed pretty clear to me. She couldn't tap into her powers as her power could only be unlocked through the determination to protect what she loved (Link), she kept approaching the issue academically and spiritually instead of emotionally.
> supporting characters are flanderized vignettes
I agree in regards to Daruk and Revali, but not so much Mipha and Urbosa which are characterized well given how little time the story gives them.
> and the overcoming of the conflict
not sure what you mean here as they objectively lost the conflict. Literally everyone dies including Link which is the entire premise of the game.
> present-day narrative is about as undramatic as it could possibly have been, with the tone never underscoring properly how world-ending the threat is,
disagree. It's clear and evident by the setting of the game that the threat has left the world in ruins and the few civilizations left are in hiding from it (with very few travellers willing to venture out), contrasting this with TotK makes this even more obvious. Multiple side characters during gameplay also acknowledge the threat from monsters and calamity ganon still looming over, with many alluding to a time before the great calamity.
> finale feels like Link and Zelda are in their own world against Ganondorf just as badly as TP, but without the emotional stakes of having been on an evolving adventure with a companion like Midna.
Agree in the sense that present-day Zelda needed more, well, presence for it to have any impact in the finale. Also, the final boss of BotW is awful which harms the entire finale sequence of the game. The opening and ending of TotK are a lot better in this regard.

>9 years and counting of seethe over BotW
imagine if /v/ existed when OoT released

>>739555226
>seemed pretty clear to me. She couldn't tap into her powers as her power could only be unlocked through the determination to protect what she loved (Link), she kept approaching the issue academically and spiritually instead of emotionally.
Yeah. But it's not a very emotionally satisfying journey either way. Like, this is probably one of the most rudimentary stories ever told in Zelda.
>Mipha and Urbosa
Mipha had a surprising sadness due to being betrothed or something, but she ultimately just feels like a cutout character. Urbosa is just because fans fawn over her design because "people of color" bullshit. Her scene at night was okay but nothing interesting.
>here as they objectively lost the conflict
Zelda finally triggereing the power is the conflict resolution and climax of the "Story of the Past", even if it's not a victory.
>the threat has left the world in ruins and the few civilizations left are in hiding from it
All I see is a cookie-cutter world too idyllic and romanticized to tonally match Ganon. Calamity Ganon should have been personified, or showed "haunting" Link more or something (something they do a bit better with Phantom Ganon in the sequel) like... yeah there's a few places where the dark music evokes a little bit, and the black goop reminds you of the center of evil in Hyrule Castle. But then you fight Ganon, and it not being a personified threat or something that acts as a foil to Link's heroics I really feel left empty-handed by the primary threat. It felt empty and boring to me on a conceptual level, like they didn't properly concept this idea. Even if you can say "Game about Nature" meets "Hurricane-type villain". I think what disappointed me is that there's no way to fight Ganon as the "Hurricane" version we see floating around the Castle. That should've been the second or a third phase IMO, to really get comeuppance. And it's especially the ending that made me feel like BotW just doesn't pay off.

>>739548207
The annoying thing about TotK is that it's a direct sequel to a game that it supersedes entirely. BotW on its own seems redundant now.

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>climb high peak
>bad weather
>fight a mini boss
>weather clears into a rainbow
overall it's meh but it does have its moments

>>739550881
>between TotK and EoW they clearly did not learn why people liked BotW so much in the first place
It really is funny, isn't it.

>>739552104
There's no reason to play it if you've already played through BotW in full. It's the same exact game but with mid caves, mid sky islands and shit depths.

admit it, there are snoys itt