>like Zelda games in theory
>like being a plucky adventurer in a big world and in over his head
>like the dynamic gameplay of running, jumping, stabbing, swinging, bombing etc
>like the world being full of secrets and things you can come back to
>dislike the IP and the writing and tone of the series
It just feels to mechanical and archetypal somehow, like it's populated by barebones placeholder cliches that are just there pro forma to justify the puzzles instead of having a unique identity and story that feeds into the puzzles and vice versa.
The challenges are there just to be challenges instead of also telling you something more about the world, and this is best reflected in the fact they reuse the setting and character and story formula in every game. The only exception to this was Link to the Past which I love because I feel the mechanics and context are on the same level.
Anyone else feel like this?
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someone forward this miyamoto, the president and allah for crying out loud
I like Zelda's wierd world.
What I dont like is BOTW forever forcing the series to be open world slop.
I like the weirdness, I just wish it played more into the gameplay, and that the gameplay played into the story. But Zelda's story and world aren't worth thinking about because the devs themselves don't think about them, they're as superficial as possible, and the puzzles could be isolated and inserted into other games without issue.
>forever forcing the series to be open world slop
It's only been two games, calm down
Yeah, they'll totally revert back to the OoT format after Breath of the Kingdom printed money and created millions of new fans.
I too remember the doom that Wind Waker brought on the franchise.
It's still felt to this day. Nintendo has been incapable of making Zeldas with the same tone and adventuresome feeling as the earlier games before Wind Waker.
what about majoras mask?
I liked Majora's Mask but it's more of an outlier with a crisis premise than the grand adventure concept that Zelda is known for and promises. It's a good game and spinoff, but it's kind of isolated within the IP.
BotW is fun but it's probably the worst at this since shrines take my least favorite thing about the games and make it exponentially worse, they're completely isolated physics puzzles that have nothing to do with the world and the story, they could've been a Portal-like game that's just a series of puzzles and no one would know the difference or think "you know this feels like a Zelda puzzle".
At least previous games made some attempt to incorporate the dungeons into the world but shrines are so separate from everything else visually, thematically, tonally etc that they completely break immersion.
you know it's funny, I never had that much fun playing the older 3D OoT-style zeldas. I wasn't bored with them but I wasn't having fun either. BotW is the first time I started genuinely enjoying the series. I really don't know why I wasn't having fun with the older games
Not really, I'm completely fine with video game contrivances. The world doesn't have to make sense, it just has to be fun.
what game is that? is it fun?
No idea, I just like the webm.
It's not a game and the webm lies to you.
Warframe?
the games have honestly stopped having stakes. Nintendo is afraid of taking actual risks.
>oh noes Zelda has been turned into a dragon, this is permanent and forever
>PSYCHE LOVE AND FRIENDSHIP!
I find boring how it's always these "fetch these 4 macguffins and come back to fight the final boss" every single time. There is no element of surprise in Zelda games. You don't get sudden plot developments or twists. They always give the excuse "it's a game for kids", but 99% of players are adults.
The surprises are in the mechanics and their applications in the world, which do vary from game to game. Story has generally been window dressing in Zelda and it's best off that way.
Yeah, exactly, you could even have the same gameplay but presented differently (for example instead of intentionally heading out to the obvious final boss lair, it could be presented as the fifth macguffin dungeon but the end boss just barges in midway and puts you on the spot) and it would feel a lot more interesting, but it's such a predictable mechanical take on adventure that it squanders all the potential of the IP, the art, the mythos etc.
I think that's just your nostalgia, I do like OoT's atmosphere despite not playing it as a kid, but it's still guilty of this cold and sterile approach to designing the adventure.
Why should games for children be worse just because they're for children? The Digimon anime treated its kid audience with respect and was light years ahead of the formulaic Pokemon anime for it. I played all the classic Zelda games chronologically as an adult and ALTTP is the only one that feels like a rounded experience which caused childlike wonder in me, all the others feel like generic puzzle games wearing a Zelda skin.
>but it's still guilty of this cold and sterile approach to designing the adventure.
what does this even mean? how exactly would you inject more flavor? the game is teeming with weird little japanese and nintendo quirks
It means they set down a "symmetrical" template for how the game's adventure should look like and then just populated it with themed challenges, kind of like how every Pokemon game's adventure consists from touring 8 themed gyms, you pick up on the pattern quickly and then it becomes more like a job/task than a quest.
There's no "flavor" to the dungeons, they're just arbitrary isolated challenges with a theme to play and beat instead of having relevance to the world, the characters, the history etc. The dungeons as locations in the world exist only for the player to beat them instead of even trying to be incorporated into the story and themes somehow.
>There's no "flavor" to the dungeons, they're just arbitrary isolated challenges with a theme to play and beat instead of having relevance to the world, the characters, the history etc.
I agree with you about the dungeons for the most part, which are overrated as all hell as a part of the experience, but with the N64 Zeldas, the games' actual world does a better job of integrating its actual mechanics and themes together than basically anything else in all of gaming, and I'd definitely say that they are some of the least 'gamey' feeling games ever made in terms of making something that gives you the sense you're exploring something 'alive' and dynamic, and where you actually want to think in terms of "why was this thing put here by these people?" because that's potentially relevant to allowing you to discover things, instead of a static set of obstacles that just exist for you to stumble over.
Yeah, I like the outside areas and wish more was done with them, but they're such a small part of the games with all the focus being on dungeons, meanwhile BotW and TotK have the opposite problem where the outside is too big and too watered down and not as interesting as a result.
>but they're such a small part of the games with all the focus being on dungeons
This isn't the case at all unless you're just ignoring most of the side content.
There's a few of instances where that's not true such as rescuing Princess Ruto in Jabu Jabu's Belly or Nabooru's interactions in Spirit Temple, both of who go on to be story relevant and, in Ruto's case, is directly relevant to her character. I'd maybe even say Kakariko Village's darker undertones are well expressed in Bottom of the Well, and adds intrigue to the location itself.
i cannot even think of a dungeon where the dungeons are NOT integrated into the world, OP is making the dungeons sound like portal puzzles or something
Nah all of them are, the whole point of beating them is that the areas they're located in go to shit when Ganon takes over. Kokiri village gets overrun by monsters, Gorons are getting eaten, Zora Bau freezes over, Kakiriko village is in a depression after the Hyrule town refugees come in, Ganon's witch mothers go crazy. I'm starting to think OP is trolling.
Look at it this way, if the temples all had only one room containing all the items you need, how many immersive elements would be removed as a result? To me they felt entirely mechanical and irrelevant to the outside world.
this is so reductive lol
>if you removed each element of a game, how many immersive elements would be left?
The point is that removing the dungeons, which are the bulk of the gameplay, *wouldn't* remove many immersive elements, because the dungeons are largely just mechanical puzzles.
how would it not remove immersive elements? are you trolling? im starting to think you've never played the game, so you're telling me removing the great deku tree, or inside jabbu's belly, or going into death mountain for the fire temple, ect ect, have no immersive elements? and that they are just giant puzzle boxes akin to divine beasts? lol ok
It's really funny because it does sound like a more fitting description for BoTW
>There's no "flavor" to the dungeons, they're just arbitrary isolated challenges with a theme to play and beat instead of having relevance to the world, the characters, the history etc.
how is there no flavor to them? they all are themed according to whichever culture they belong to, and often have characters that you have met previously acting as the sage, or impudence for said temple, and they will typically build upon the themes and concepts of their childhood counterpart, often times exploring the history of past hyrule (shadow temple exploring hyrules history of torture)
>instead of having relevance to the world, the characters, the history etc.
each one of them has relevance to the history of the world and is typically explained as some ancient spiritual place of worship for each culture
>The dungeons as locations in the world exist only for the player to beat them instead of even trying to be incorporated into the story and themes somehow.
every game is designed to be beaten, you are acting like most games feel like fluid worlds with dynamic and open solutions. i cannot think of one dungeon that is not tied into the story, and explained in some way, like how can you say this when just to get to the spirit temple, you have to fix a bridge, and free builders from a gerudo dungeon, use a trinket (eye of truth) from a previous dungeon to follow a ghost across a sandstorm, and then travel back in time to meet the sage of the spirit temple and unblock an obstacle for your adult self, and once you've beaten said temple, you fight ganondorfs evil witch mothers and free the sage. seems pretty dynamic to me.
your descriptions really do try and paint it in the most sterile way possible, and your comparisons about it feeling like a pokemon seem to be how you see it, which is doing a massive disservice to the reality of the game. a pokemon gym is a big building with a few trainers you fight, an OOT temple is much more than that.
have you played OOT? i aesthetic is kino, it being archetypal is a good thing, it has a certain mythical vibe that almost no other game can touch
This is seriously just nostalgia. The game feels barren *and* cartoony. It literally feels like someone took SOTC and turned it into a Saturday morning 90s kids show.
played it when i was 25, they just hit on archetypal themes really well, i think visually, musically, everything really comes together for a strong aesthetic package
this thread started with and consists of incredibly milquetoast opinions that contrarians have regurgitated for more than two decades
>I don't like the tone or story!
because you played them as a cynical old man who can't comprehend that these are games made to appeal to a sense of childlike wonder.
it's why every one of you tasteless homosexuals says "lttp was the best one" yeah what a fricking surprise Black person go watch some more game grumps
dogshit thread
Pizza Tower also appeals to a sense of childlike wonder, but it's not huffing its own farts at how epic and serious it is, so it's a much better game as a result.
children would not give a frick about pizza tower explicitly because it draws on the nostalgia of crusty old frickers as it's main appeal. the fact that you would even begin to compare the experience of pizza tower, a mechanics-focused game, to zelda shows the depth of your moronation
>PIZZA TOWER ISN'T FUN BECAUSE LE BOOMERS MIGHT LIKE IT!
Pizza tower is great, shame your reading comprehension isnt
>lttp was the best one
It is though.
No one cares, you have no sense of wonder or childlike joy
Is that a codeword for "I'm nostalgic for my childhood when I played the game and I have no other argument"
>dislike the IP and the writing and tone of the series
This but also the art style. I like the 2D games though because they tend to be more gameplay focused & in spite of it all I like majoras mask.
I disagree, I don't think there's many games that nail the archetypal atmosphere like OOT does.
What makes e.g. a Fire Temple in a Zelda game superior to a fire themed dungeon in any other game?
>Indian themed temple with Muslim chanting, implying the Gorons are singing. The Dragon causing the red smoke cloud outside is literally eating the Gorons alive.
Nah, you're wrong about it not integrating story or themes into the dungeons, The Shadow Dungeon was literally a torture chamber for the treasoners of Hyrule. The Forest temple is clearly inspired by castles of the Anglo regions, and the Water temple feels like Atlantis. Even the Spirit Temple kind of ties in the coming-of-age themes in the game.
100%
It's because everything is carefully curated to be a unique experience in the linear games and in the open world everywhere serves as an environment for one of a dozen activities
Then play other games in the same vein.
>Alundra
>Beyond Oasis
>Blazer trilogy
>Crusader of Centy
>Fable
>Landstalker
>Light Crusader
>Mana series
>Oceanhorn
>Okami
All of them without exception have much shittier world/lore/mechanical integration compared to Zelda.
alundra is the best 2D zelda
I haven't liked Zelda for a very long time, and I realized I got into the series for the wrong reasons. There's more divisive games than actual good games.
They don't bother to make good dungeons anymore and the combat is 20 years behind a majority of games.
>the combat is 20 years *ahead of* a majority of games
FTFY
There's so much nuance to Zelda's combat that basically doesn't matter because the enemies mostly just suck. It easily has better fundumental mechanics than Souls style iframes or DMC's "combos lol".
Why did the series artstyle peak on the N64?
Perfect blend of high fantasy and anime. Characters and world written with context by devs that actually gave a shit and wanted players to wonder about everything around them.