GOTY 2023

Cool. I'm not paying full price for a worse version of a game I already own.

Okay.

I didn't say that, you did.

No.

Denying reality doesn't make you right you goofball, a lot of people from actual gaming circles and a big portion of normies love BotW and kr has basically become the go to when people think of Zelda as a franchise

>You mean nintenbabbies. Normies prefer Dad of War and FIFA.
Zelda is one of the most normie franchises in history, every wannabe nerd loves or pretends to love Zelda.

Nigga I am not reading all that. I loved OoT and MM as a kid, then WW blew my mind because I have always loved the sensation of exploring a huge world, then TP was middling, and I skipped SS entirely because it was waggle trash and I wasn't buying even more Nintendo peripherals. Played all the GBC, GBA, and DS games in the meanwhile.

These people who pine for the zelda dark ages of gamecube and wii will never stop getting btfod by newer zelda games finally being goty level again. All while being more faithful to original zelda than OoT was, as illustrated by this picture

Cope shitters your game just sucks and doesn't have something unique in its genre like totk does. Even BG3 can be fully replicated by playing dos2. Good luck building controllable airplanes in botw. Even without the building and physics, as you can see from this picture, totk is pure distilled classic zelda brought to life. Literally every concept drawing from 30 years ago fully realized in this game. It's a shame they couldn't do this during gamecube/wii eras but I guess there's a reason why those consoles are known as the zelda dark ages.

drawn in the 90s, perfectly illustrating things you can do in totk that no other zelda has all of.

>They're different but only you're sad about it.
Not the only one, but I am sad about it. I want Zelda games. Haven't had a new one in over a decade. Even if BotW was revolutionary, which it wasn't, it did nothing we haven't seen before, it's just following that open world trend thanks to Skyrim and Minecraft. It should've been a new IP instead of commandeering a 30 year old series.

Skyrim is still by far the better open world and I don't even like it. It actually justifies its open world by focusing on the worldbuilding and lore first and foremost. Same with Minecraft justifies its open world. Neither games would work any other way. Ubisoft is not the only dev that makes open worlds.
Not having quest markers is not revolutionary design. If anything I could easily see them not having them only because they wouldn't wanted to have marked every seed and shrine, have the player see all that garbage, and shut the game down right then and there.
>I think you're too blinded by nostalgia to see what they actually accomplished
No. I gave BotW every chance. I was excited as hell for it. I thought an open world could work for Zelda pretty easily. Still do. But not how they're doing it.

>You're done here. I love Elder Scrolls games and Skyrim was raw cancer.
And I love Zelda games and BotW was raw cancer. Means nothing.

It wouldn't have sold anywhere near as much, but it still likely would've created a successful new IP.

yes, zelda fans are upset that the series got turned into yet another openworld slopfest
yes, the genre is the hottest shit in town, hogwarts legacy wouldnt be the best selling game this year if it was a third person shooter like the deathly hallows games
yes, the only true zelda games left to look forward to are the overhead classic zeldas

goddamn everyone wants their series to go open world and I have no idea why, all it does is add a large world you will actively skip over and watch a ton of loading screens
people want open world monster hunter despite the fact that open world would add absolutely nothing

You took a non-reward, and you replaced it with another non-reward. All you did was change the color of the glitter that comes out of the treasure chest. Would've been alleviated somewhat if you could at least use koroks and shrine rewards for more things. Why are koroks only relegated to one use?

Or, hear me out:

>have really challenging puzzle, which is fun on its own
>have reward that can be used in multiple ways, like a much more rare rupee

I play Terraria and regularly enjoy the rewards you get when you explore, primarily because nothing is ever relegated to one use.

>Armor, Zoanite, Rupies, weapins/shields, mavhine parts, blessings (which come from shrines), and materials all can be used in multiple ways
Then you don't need koroks spammed everywhere, do you? So why spam these useless rewards? By your logic, if you need 1000 pieces of poop to be scattered everywhere, then everything you listed isn't that good of a reward.

Then you don't need koroks if you supposedly have so many rewards. So why fill the game with useless spam?

>our game totally has hundreds of hours of amazing content
>but it also needs filler that takes no effort to find or solve
>without this filler the game falls apart and is unplayable

hmmm

>objectively false
Then you don't need the koroks, especially 1000 of them.

>What the fuck else would have been there?
>What else would have been in THE ZONAITE FORGE

I don't know anon maybe some fucking Zonaite? Or a little guy who sells you charges or cores or whatever to upgrade your battery? I wasted a bunch of items to fly to a part of the sky unreachable by regular means only to run into one korok seed and a shrine, something I literally can't take a ten second walk without encountering on the overworld. At least put a deciphering tablet or a pattern or an NPC or a fucking anything there. An interesting setpiece, a short cutscene, a moment of something slightly varied? I understand half of the overworld being the same old shit but it took an actual ounce of effort to reach the zonaite forge and it didn't even give me and fucking zonaite? Come on.

Looks fucking gay. Why do half his outfits look so fucking gay. God I hate women and homos, make your own shit, stop infecting everything else because nobody wants the shit you make.

>not knowing there is a secret hidden room there you need to stand on lava to access that has no visible clue to it's existence.

I take it all back 10/10 goty.

>Lmao listen to yourself
These towers were larger than even a full size stamina bar could climb. When I said climb I meant scale, not literally just push up on the control stick. That's why they were actually a challenge to get to the top of.

Two people spent their hard earned money to give anon a great gift and he just rejected it entirely. That's a dick move, doesn't matter if the game's shit, he should still play it in appreciation of the gift giver.

I liked Metroid and also loved Metroid Prime despite it doing pretty much that. If they had an open-world Metroid where you flew the ship around and explored the same planet from multiple tunnel entrances that had to be interconnected on the inside there's some meat to the idea but it probably wouldn't be done that well. IIRC Metroid Prime 3 had a bunch of backtracking in that way and it didn't go so well.

> find shrine, walk in
> 15 second loading screen
> skip intro text
> complete puzzle, touch ending pad
> skip text
> da da-da-da-daaa! you got a thing
> skip text
> teleported outside

Multiply this process by 170, and you have the core game loop for the game. it sucks.

>complain if their food is not served in a particular bowl
My brother was always like this and he's a programmer now. Whereas I was always well behaved and submissive and just became an office wagie.

Fucking hate shrine.

It just proves that Zelda, the brand, is worth more Nintendo and its blind consumers than the original intention of the OG game design.

>The "OG game design" was exhausted
I shouldn't have to point out why this statement is bullshit and why you're not a fan of the series, fuck off.
>They were critically panned
Even SS has a 93. No journo stands up to Nintendo.

SS caught flak the same way all Zelda games catch flak, by people complaining about it online. It doesn't change that it still got suck off by journos and was not critically panned.

Ocarina of Time, in my opinion, also had nothing to do with the original intention. It started a number of trends that Nintendo spent 2 decades apeing until it got stale. I feel like the portable games captured the best essence of the OG without all of the baggage of 3d Zelda

Stranding
>>Slop
Yep, it's the height of slop. Just like most kojima trash.

the only ones praising totk are astroturfing nintendo cultists whose baseline for what constitutes a good game in 2023 is a mario game from the 90s and anything better than that is a 10/10 masterpiece

Of course people like Nintenslop games. All the cultists who will throw a massive babybitch tantrum if their 2004-tier games didn't get preferential treatment.

Taken a break from worshiping your newest rehashed, repackaged Nintendo turd?

>incoherent schizobabble
Least mindbroken Nintendo cultist.

>and I quote!
>doesn't quote

Cope

Stop multi replying to me you're making a fool of yourself. This is how mad you are.

Look at all that crying he's gonna greenbelt himself into a coma

>actually Mad

Calm down nerd

Calm down nerd she won't fuck you

Another triggered little boy. Hit too close to home with a generic insult. This website is 18+.

You're mad you got called an incel and now you won't shut up about it lmao

>Played 100 hours of optional content you didn't enjoy
What the fuck dude.

I dunno man this is sounding more and more like a You Problem. I had a 200 hour run of TotK and enjoyed all of it because I liked the actual mechanics of the game.

This. I at least had some hope the series could turn things around after SS. Even with BotW I wanted to believe in the longshot that they could actually try to just use it as a foundation, fix its problems, reintegrate the Zelda, but with TotK the series is dead to me. It's pandering to a completely different crowd that it has zero respect for, they're the new Pokemon.

>Low-gravity bubble puzzles
>Flying sky ship platforming
>Minecart dungeon inside a volcano after building your own goron-powered bomber
>Rebuilding the Spirit construct and doing rockem sockem fights
>Exploring Hyrule Castle for secrets and the 5-Phantom Ganon fight
>Desert puzzle temple with zombies
idk dude I had a blast.
>Tons of other minidungeons hidden within caves like the buried desert prison, the minecart shooting gallery, and the pirate cove
>Three multi-tier labyrinths

idk dude I had a great time.

Problem with all of that is that it was not only not challenging, but could be trivialized because the game gives you too many ways to cheese or break progression. You can skip the entire fire temple with a hover bike, for instance.

>Morrowind lets you kill NPCs, including plot crucial ones
>TOTK doesn't even let you backhand Zelda

:big think:

Morrowind and TotK give you approximately the same narrative freedom. In neither game does anything you do change the ending or make the final boss any better.

Yes.

Minecart dungeon was an interesting maze
Bubble dungeon was a delight to explore
Spirit dungeon incorporated all different ways of using Zonai devices and the reward of a customizable golem was spectacular.
The desert dungeon was spooky and had a great boss fight

This discounts the whole adventure of unlocking and getting to these dungeons. I got into the Spirit dungeon completely by accident because I thought the thundercloud looked weird. The entire Gerudo Desert was a great adventure, both getting to Gerudo City, setting up defenses, fighting with the guards against waves of gibdos, etc.

The whole adventure was awesome.

If someone puts a puzzle in front of you, are you the type to try and complete the puzzle, no questions asked? This might be a meta-opinion of mine, but with the amount of games out there that also have puzzles (even similar puzzles), I always have to ask why I'm taking part in the puzzle. If the game cannot justify a puzzle to me, in the context of the game, I begin to look for ways to subvert the puzzle. That's how my brain works.

For the Fire Temple in particular, I skipped most of the railcart stuff with pinecones and fire arrows, and just climbing my way to the various gongs. And I was generally disappointed at how I could do that.

The two best temples, the Wind Temple and the Lightning Temple, are... okay. The Lightning Temple gets a special mention, and I might consider it "good", since it limits your movement to the inside of the temple, and introduces very Indiana Jones-ish traps that make it feel like an actual tomb.

Weakest is the Water Temple, by far; I just don't understand what it's purpose is in-context. Forgettable.

Overall, the temples (while a step up from Breath of the Wild) are huge step down in comparison to the previous entries.

Everything else in the game is a slog, and is just passing time between temples.

This is why these games should be a new IP. I imagine the vast majority of newbies it brought in are just like you. This content sucks, it's boring, it's hard, etc. so skip it, cheese it, the game is good because you can skip and cheese all of its boring bad parts, which is most of its actual content, so you can get right back into all the walking/running around, showing off the nuts and bolts contraptions and basic immersive sim elements on tiktok.
It's totally antithetical to what Zelda used to be.

I'm personally a big fan of "soft-gating". That is, making it possible for players to go where they want to go, but making them so ineffectual in that place that they are incentivized to look elsewhere. I'm thinking Water areas in Super Metroid. Yeah, you can try and sequence break if you want to, but your experience will be super hampered until you get what you need to move freely in the water.