Gaming

This is more of a personal one but weirdly enough I gotta go with Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. Fantastic game objectively, it's like BotW but just with way more content, but even right when it came out, for some reason I just couldn't shake that feeling in the back of my mind that I was just a bit disappointed.

It's totally my fault for following the game's development and the Zelda theory community for so many years after BotW, expecting a really good story structure and so much more with the sky additions, but I couldn't help but feel let down by how little there was to do in the sky and just how absolutely empty the Depths felt. I don't think anything will ever compare to the excitement of my first BotW playthrough, everything was so new and exciting and ready to be explored (hell I'm STILL learning new stuff about that game), but TotK is the first Zelda game I've ever played that I just put down after like a month and never finished.

The Depths were SO cool the first time you find a way down, that music cue that plays is honestly perfect and just so chilling and haunting and it made me so excited. But man, once you see one area, you've seen em all, and that applies to the sky islands too. I also wish it felt more connected to BotW; some pretty important characters just straight up act like they've never met Link and it makes no sense with how heavily this was marketed as a direct sequel. It almost feels to me like this is just a remixed version of BotW as opposed to a direct sequel, because it kinda just acts like BotW doesn't really matter. I can appreciate making a game as accessible as possible to people who didn't play the first one, but cmon man, there's stuff in TotK that doesn't make a ton of sense unless you played BotW, so I don't see why so many NPCs act like the first game didn't happen. It was one of the biggest Nintendo games like, ever, why go only 10% of the way in connecting the games? Just felt weird to me.

I wouldn't say it's necessarily "glorified DLC" like everyone was worried about, but honestly they weren't insanely far off in my opinion. I just felt like most of the new powers were underutilized and the game was almost TOO easy to break, and didn't encourage much creativity with Ultrahand. Once you find a cheap and simple vehicle that works, you kinda just stick with it because it'll disappear as soon as you get distracted by another task. And the memory system worked super well in BotW because we already knew the ending to that story, it was about finding the puzzle pieces, but TotK's memories are very clearly written in an intentionally linear way, and for me, it just doesn't fit with the "discover-in-any-order" method of seeing the memories. I just wish the player got to experience and be a part of the story rather than see it all in a disjointed order taking place in the past (and it's also super easy to spoil the story if you happen to find the wrong memory before seeing the rest).

To say something positive, the physics system is INSANE and I can't believe they got it working as smoothly as they did. And the game runs great, it's so massive and yet honestly it struggled less than BotW did sometimes on my WiiU and original-model Switch! It looks beautiful and the music is great. I just didn't feel that same excitement I get from every other Zelda game.

So yeah for me, TotK was probably the most disappointing of the year despite the fact that I do still think it's a pretty great game overall, and absolutely a huge feat in Nintendo's catalog. Just not what I hoped for from a Zelda game, especially after how game-changing (pun not intended) BotW was, and I know a lot of fans (especially us who are really into the story and lore) feel the same.