Nintendo president Shuntaro Furukawa has explained to Japanese magazine Famitsu that video game development will become even longer, more complex, and more sophisticated in the future and that mergers…
A Link to the Past is not completely linear; once you have the hammer from the Palace of Darkness, you can choose between the Swamp Palace, Skull Woods or Thieves’ Town, and Thieves’ Town unlocks the Ice Palace and Misery Mire. Granted, the game tells you what order to do them in, but you are occasionally free to choose otherwise. Not so in, say, Twilight Princess, which is extremely flaggy.
I do think that TotK was very sloppily handled. On the one hand it’s an amazing piece of software, that the physics systems they made actually…work. I’ve seen them take flak for re-using BotW’s map, which I don’t mind. The thing is, they did it very hamfistedly. In BotW, it makes sense that no one knows who you are because you’ve been in stasis for 100 years, there’s only a handful of people alive who recognize you. In BotW, you’re an interloper. TotK seems to take place 6 years after BotW (Given how some of the children like Nebb and Riju have aged, Bolson/Rhondson having a ~5 year old daughter, etc, plus that’s the time between the games’ release dates) and Link has been living and working in Hyrule this whole time…except he apparently hasn’t. Zelda seems to have appropriated the house in Hateno Link bought, so where does Link live? Too many people outright don’t recognize him when they see him. It feels like they wanted to make a clean-sheet game and not a sequel.
Frankly it also feels like any idea anyone came up with ended up in the game. “Let’s have a cavernous underground.” Okay, the lazy way to make that is to invert the terrain map of the surface which doesn’t make logical sense, and then do extremely little with this very large environment. “Let’s have islands in the sky.” Okay, here’s some cookie cutter islands floating in the sky that are difficult to reach and traverse with large expanses of emptiness and the ability to make flying machines that don’t last long enough to actually move around. “How about a sidequest where an NPC asks Link to put some wheels on a cart for her? I’ve already written 90 pages of related dialog.” Yes, put it in the game completely unedited.
A Link to the Past is not completely linear; once you have the hammer from the Palace of Darkness, you can choose between…
The thing is that by the time you reach they point youbahve done the tutorial zones in the normal world and you have explored some of the “sacred land”, plus you should already be hooked into the story. BotW and TotK both give you a short introduction and then it’s all pepega, it really feels like you have less direction than in skyrim.
Also, this is something that TotK did better than BotW, kinda. They tell you about the final enemy right from the beginning, there’s no mystery element for the player character, whereas in a link to the past or skyward sword the pc really doesn’t know what’s happening, you just know that there’d something wrong.
In a sense, in BotW there’s no from 0 to hero feeling, you are the hero, not just someone that raises up to the task, but someone that did raise, failed, and is expected to do so again. To me, it feels like the post-game of a better game and that’s bad.
In TotK there’s some sense of mystery since the story begins with you trying to search Zelda, not knowing what happened to the castle. In the end we just fix 4 things in 4 places to get stronger but that again feels like a side quest you do while searching for Zelda, that’s the initial quest and the one I cared for the most when I found out. It still feels like post-gameish because you have a super sense of urgency for Zelda, and there’s 4 places where they saw her and once you go they have issues that you don’t have the fucking time to solve where the fuck is Zelda but you have to do them I guess.
My issue in both games is that you have a big sense of urgency due to the dangers ahead being very real and very in your face, but then there’s tons of stupid content and side quests of people that don’t give two shits about your quest. Yeah let’s collect horses while Zelda has been 200 years being tortured in pain to contain the big bad, no big deal.
I as a player know stuff is boing on because it’s a TLoZ game, but I like the PC being in the dark about that stuff so I don’t feel bad for not fixing the world asap.
A Link to the Past is not completely linear; once you have the hammer from the Palace of Darkness, you can choose between the Swamp Palace, Skull Woods or Thieves’ Town, and Thieves’ Town unlocks the Ice Palace and Misery Mire. Granted, the game tells you what order to do them in, but you are occasionally free to choose otherwise. Not so in, say, Twilight Princess, which is extremely flaggy.
I do think that TotK was very sloppily handled. On the one hand it’s an amazing piece of software, that the physics systems they made actually…work. I’ve seen them take flak for re-using BotW’s map, which I don’t mind. The thing is, they did it very hamfistedly. In BotW, it makes sense that no one knows who you are because you’ve been in stasis for 100 years, there’s only a handful of people alive who recognize you. In BotW, you’re an interloper. TotK seems to take place 6 years after BotW (Given how some of the children like Nebb and Riju have aged, Bolson/Rhondson having a ~5 year old daughter, etc, plus that’s the time between the games’ release dates) and Link has been living and working in Hyrule this whole time…except he apparently hasn’t. Zelda seems to have appropriated the house in Hateno Link bought, so where does Link live? Too many people outright don’t recognize him when they see him. It feels like they wanted to make a clean-sheet game and not a sequel.
Frankly it also feels like any idea anyone came up with ended up in the game. “Let’s have a cavernous underground.” Okay, the lazy way to make that is to invert the terrain map of the surface which doesn’t make logical sense, and then do extremely little with this very large environment. “Let’s have islands in the sky.” Okay, here’s some cookie cutter islands floating in the sky that are difficult to reach and traverse with large expanses of emptiness and the ability to make flying machines that don’t last long enough to actually move around. “How about a sidequest where an NPC asks Link to put some wheels on a cart for her? I’ve already written 90 pages of related dialog.” Yes, put it in the game completely unedited.
The thing is that by the time you reach they point youbahve done the tutorial zones in the normal world and you have explored some of the “sacred land”, plus you should already be hooked into the story. BotW and TotK both give you a short introduction and then it’s all pepega, it really feels like you have less direction than in skyrim.
Also, this is something that TotK did better than BotW, kinda. They tell you about the final enemy right from the beginning, there’s no mystery element for the player character, whereas in a link to the past or skyward sword the pc really doesn’t know what’s happening, you just know that there’d something wrong.
In a sense, in BotW there’s no from 0 to hero feeling, you are the hero, not just someone that raises up to the task, but someone that did raise, failed, and is expected to do so again. To me, it feels like the post-game of a better game and that’s bad.
In TotK there’s some sense of mystery since the story begins with you trying to search Zelda, not knowing what happened to the castle. In the end we just fix 4 things in 4 places to get stronger but that again feels like a side quest you do while searching for Zelda, that’s the initial quest and the one I cared for the most when I found out. It still feels like post-gameish because you have a super sense of urgency for Zelda, and there’s 4 places where they saw her and once you go they have issues that you don’t have the fucking time to solve where the fuck is Zelda but you have to do them I guess.
My issue in both games is that you have a big sense of urgency due to the dangers ahead being very real and very in your face, but then there’s tons of stupid content and side quests of people that don’t give two shits about your quest. Yeah let’s collect horses while Zelda has been 200 years being tortured in pain to contain the big bad, no big deal.
I as a player know stuff is boing on because it’s a TLoZ game, but I like the PC being in the dark about that stuff so I don’t feel bad for not fixing the world asap.