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Wednesday, June 28, 2023
Approaching the end of Tears of the Kingdom
I am 145 hours into Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom and think that I am approaching the end of the main story. As I am still having fun, and am way past my "1 hour per dollar paid" benchmark, I don't regret having bought the game full price. Not that with Nintendo Switch games there are too many discount options. So, where am I, and what am I thinking of TotK now?
I have done 121 shrines out of 152, and 42 lightroots out of 120. I have also done the 4 regional "phenomena" dungeons and killed their bosses, and am currently on the search for the "5th sage". Between the rewards from the shrines and the bosses, I now have 27 hearts, and 3 full rings of stamina. With a good armor, the semi boss fight in Hyrule Castle against 15 Phantom Ganons ended up being easy, without me having to do anything clever to beat them. I just hit them repeatedly with the Master Sword. I also found 109 Korok seeds out of 1,000.
Although I am very far from 100-percenting the game, the amount of shrines and Korok seeds that I did are more than sufficient. I want to do all shrines before I finish this playthrough, but it really isn't necessary. The minimum requirement for ending the game is 2 rings of stamina (which needs 20 shrines) and 10 hearts (which need another 28 shrines, or just 12 if you count the 4 hearts from regional bosses). With Korok seeds it is the same, there are a thousand in the game, but you can't even spend more than 431, and honestly, with 100 you have enough inventory slots for all practical purposes.
I find that is a good and interesting game design. You can finish the game with 10 hearts or up to 38, depending on how much time you want to spend doing shrines. And obviously boss fights are a lot easier with more hearts. I am not very good at action combat, in general and in this game, I can't pull of flurry rushes or other maneuvers that require you to press more than 2 buttons simultaneously on the controller. But as I like doing shrines anyway, I can compensate for my lack of skill with that, and still get to the end.
It also helps that I fully understand the weapon fusing system, which judging by some streams I saw isn't necessarily the case for everybody. I now have a single-handed sword with a power of 138 (Scimitar of the Seven with Silver Lynel Horn fused). That isn't the theoretical maximum, but then the theoretical maximum is a sword that is nearly breaking, and can only be used for hits that don't use up weapon durability. But as early as the tutorial, understanding weapon fusing is a huge help, as it improves both attack power and durability of weapons massively. The one thing that is bad about the weapon fusing system is that if you want to use a monster part that you have in your inventory, you need to drop it before fusing your weapon with it. I think it is this that keeps a lot of people from maximizing their weapon potential early in the game. If during the tutorial you constantly use the best base weapon you found, even if that is just a wooden stick early on, fused to the best monster material drop you found, you'll have a relatively easy time beating all monsters. With said wooden stick normally breaking after 12 hits, and many fused items increasing that by 25, weapons breaking also is much less of a problem than in Breath of the Wild, if you play it right. Besides increasing power and durability, what base weapon you use, and what you fuse to it, also determines a lot of other attributes of your weapon. Different weapons have different ranges, different charged attacks, and are good against different enemies. You can make weapons with elemental attacks or other magic effects. So the system remains interesting throughout the game.
I personally find the armor system less interesting. Armor pieces are a lot more rare than weapons and fusing materials. And while you can upgrade armor in 4 steps, after doing a long quest, each armor upgrade uses a lot of materials that you would need to farm. This is where I am really happy, that I am not a completionist. If you wanted to collect all armor pieces in Tears of the Kingdom and upgrade them all to maximum, it would take you a really excessive amount of hours. Early in the game, you'll probably be better off to Google the location of the three Phantom Armor pieces; they can't be upgraded, but together they'll give you decent armor plus an attack buff, which will get you rather far. You can spend a lot of time changing armor in Tears of the Kingdom, if you rely a lot on the buffs each piece of armor gives. Alternatively you can use potions for the buff, and just keep the best combat armor on. Depending on how much you like cooking, that is more or less of a hassle than constantly switching gear. I personally disliked that I was for example wearing armor for heat resistance in the desert, but had to switch to combat armor and heat resistance potion when I was attacked, because the heat resistance armor wasn't upgraded. With Tears of the Kingdom having more different buffs than Breath of the Wild, armor changes can quickly get annoying.
In Breath of the Wild you spent a lot of time exploring on foot. BotW was a huge improvement over other open world games in that it allowed you to basically climb anywhere you wanted. There were no invisible walls, and if you wanted to get to the top of a mountain, you certainly could. In Tears of the Kingdom, I am walking a hell of a lot less. After the tutorial I quickly realized that getting all towers was an early priority, which then also allowed me to visit most sky islands. And once you have a bunch of sky shrines and towers unlocked, the easiest way to get anywhere is by flying down from there. Thus the weird situation that I have fewer Korok seeds than shrines, which wouldn't happen in BotW. And of the Korok seeds I have, more than half come from the new "transport a Korok to his friend" quests, which are some of the most fun activities this game has. The downside is that those quests teach you how to move from A to B with a vehicle. The sky islands provide all the parts, so quickly you can build anything from cars to ships to helicopters to rocket ships. Where I am in the game now is a set of sky islands previously hidden in a thunder cloud; but instead of moving along the chain of sky islands as intended, I just built a helicopter and flew directly to the two shrines I needed up there. A lot of exploration becomes a lot easier with vehicles, and that is a downside as well as an upside. Between vehicles, rockets attached to shields, and the ascension ability, verticality is now nearly trivial.
While a lack of exploration also leads to you finding fewer treasure chests, that isn't so bad. Only very specific treasure chests at key locations contain useful armor pieces. The large majority of chests contains stuff that is a lot less useful. That is especially noticeable when you go the extra mile in shrines to find the treasure chest hidden in each shrine: Going through some effort to do so and then finding junk like 5 arrows is quite annoying. That is a downside of the weapon fusing system, in BotW you found the good weapons in treasure chests, in TotK you build them yourself.
Tears of the Kingdom is an improvement over Breath of the Wild in as far as that you probably wouldn't want to go back. But in other areas it is more of a sidegrade than an upgrade. And some things I found better in Breath of the Wild. But the main issue of Tears of the Kingdom is how fundamentally similar to Breath of the Wild it is; that is probably a good thing for a large number of fans, but also leads to the game lacking some of the excitement of the new that BotW brought us. In any case, Tears of the Kingdom is a very good game. If Nintendo would make another sequel in 6 years and use it to sell the "Switch 2", I would probably buy the new console to play the new Zelda.
- posted by Tobold @ 12:12 PM Permanent Link
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I would love to play modern Zelda games, but I am no longer willing to buy specific hardware to play a specific game. That leaves me as a PC-only gamer. Hardware exclusives made sense to me once many years ago when there were stark differences in capabilities. However, to me those days are long gone. I realize that companies don't just exist to please me so I am not angry at console exclusives, rather disappointed that gamer's choice isn't as robust as it could be.
Anyway, just my opinion.
Anyway, just my opinion.
My sentiments with the game are fairly similar to yours. I'll go farther though and say the weapon fusion system is terrible and made the already bad weapon system of BOTW even worse.
At least in BOTW you could get around the terrible durability system by finding and collecting respawning weapons every time there was a blood moon.
With Tears there is no "getting around" the fusion system. You HAVE to fuse if you want to do any reasonable amount of damage to enemies. Especially with how much HP black and silver enemies have.
This has caused me to avoid all combat in the open world. And the instances where I do need to fight I just fuse the highest damage items I have to the Master Sword. The only combat I've enjoyed are the boss battles.
I know I could build bots to do combat for me but with most enemies not dropping good items anyways open world combat just seems unnecessary. I really hope this mechanic isn't back for future titles.
The building too while fun on its own trivializes so many things. I've run into countless shrines at this point that can all be solved by building platforms to ascend up to or just using rockets fused to a shield to skip over the puzzles.
Once I learned about building a hoverbike that ran on 2 fans I essentially stopped traveling on the ground. The 2 fan hovebike is the solution to reaching any area in the game. This means I miss basically all the random encounters and minor discoveries that the devs expect players to run into when traveling on foot or horseback. I know this is a ME problem but I can't bring myself to use slower ground options when I know I can just summon a hoverbike wherever and get to where I'm going quickly.
I only have 20 something korok seeds and I'm nearing the end of the game. I dont feel the need to look for more. I have nearly every shrine and light root unlocked however I stopped doing the shrine puzzles a while ago. Overall it's a fun game but I don't see myself playing through it again like I did with BOTW and Eldenring.
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At least in BOTW you could get around the terrible durability system by finding and collecting respawning weapons every time there was a blood moon.
With Tears there is no "getting around" the fusion system. You HAVE to fuse if you want to do any reasonable amount of damage to enemies. Especially with how much HP black and silver enemies have.
This has caused me to avoid all combat in the open world. And the instances where I do need to fight I just fuse the highest damage items I have to the Master Sword. The only combat I've enjoyed are the boss battles.
I know I could build bots to do combat for me but with most enemies not dropping good items anyways open world combat just seems unnecessary. I really hope this mechanic isn't back for future titles.
The building too while fun on its own trivializes so many things. I've run into countless shrines at this point that can all be solved by building platforms to ascend up to or just using rockets fused to a shield to skip over the puzzles.
Once I learned about building a hoverbike that ran on 2 fans I essentially stopped traveling on the ground. The 2 fan hovebike is the solution to reaching any area in the game. This means I miss basically all the random encounters and minor discoveries that the devs expect players to run into when traveling on foot or horseback. I know this is a ME problem but I can't bring myself to use slower ground options when I know I can just summon a hoverbike wherever and get to where I'm going quickly.
I only have 20 something korok seeds and I'm nearing the end of the game. I dont feel the need to look for more. I have nearly every shrine and light root unlocked however I stopped doing the shrine puzzles a while ago. Overall it's a fun game but I don't see myself playing through it again like I did with BOTW and Eldenring.
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