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the worst thing about being a Zelda fan is the fandom is so large that you have to figure out what SUBCULTURE you fit into to join discord servers. I’m not that interested in things to do with BotW/AoC/TotK so I have to avoid the large majority of discord servers bc they’re only oriented on those games. I have no interest in roleplay currently so that eliminates the second biggest subculture. I don’t know what Linked Universe even is so uh no luck there. The Zelda fandom subculture I’m most closely aligned with is the Four Swords Manga fandom I guess but do they have servers and would they be interested in things not relating exclusively to Green, Red, Blue, Vio, and Shadow??? Zelda servers are hard man I just wanna talk about my OoT AU 😩
#Loz#Legend of Zelda#the legend of Zelda#Ocarina of time#oot#please you guys wanna hear me talk about my AU oot fans plz#I know r/trueZelda or whatever exists but I’m not a BotW HATER#I just am mainly here for the story elements and BotW like. Doesn’t have a lot of that#I think totk has more story but god I can’t play the game it’s too open ended it drives me nuts
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thoughts on totk now that i’ve beaten it
under the cut bc of length and bc there is honestly a fair bit of negative stuff
i don’t really think i can say that i liked totk.
it’s fine, it’s genuinely fucking incredible from a technical standpoint with ultrahand, recall, the three map layers and with how smoothly it ran for me. as a game it’s fine.
i’ll start with the things i dislike and end with what i actually liked
i honestly didn’t really like ultrahand? i disliked how much the game leaned on it, since so many puzzles and whatever just boiled down to ‘make something that’ll work’ and it just... it was far too clunky for me to really enjoy using it, outside of using some of the same few designs for traversal. there were a few times when i could see what the game wanted me to do with ultrahand and the given zonai parts and sometimes it just... didn’t work at all. more often than not ultrahand was frustrating for me to use so the game’s reliance on it just made it into a chore sometimes.
in a similar vein the dungeons were serious letdowns. i mean, don’t get me wrong, they’re fine, they had good themes and (mostly) had good aesthetics and general looks and identities to them, but the fact that they were just... basically twenty-ish minute little things was kind of disappointing. i hate that they all had the exact same ‘go hit x number of switches’ gimmick. it really limited what you could do and fucked with the dungeon design, too. the only one where that really worked for me was the fire temple, which was my favorite overall. the water temple was especially dismal, with the least inspired look and just being an astoundingly easy experience. the puzzles in those dungeons were so awfully easy, too, especially since half of the time they just hand you what you need so you barely need to really assess the situation and put a plan together
i hated the water dungeon’s little mini-areas where you do a single piss-easy puzzle to automatically get your prize, i hated the wind temple’s god damn ‘pull a lever and get your prize’ kind of puzzles, i hated how soul-crushingly disappointed i felt when i took a look at the lightning temple’s map and realized that every fucking floor had a singular room just for the switch puzzle. god forbid it’s as fun as the lowest level of that temple. i really miss stuff like mini-bosses or rooms where you have to do a puzzle in order to just... progress, i miss dungeons that i could get lost in or spend a while in or just had... something more interesting or some more substance so that i can’t just breeze through like it’s a glorified shrine. most of the puzzles in those dungeons were simpler than some shrines i did.
i didn’t care to do much exploration since there honestly isn’t much motivation to explore the surface map if you’ve already played botw, and the scarcity of materials this time really got to me, it took me a while to have a half-decent stock of materials, and i still had trouble not running out of stuff even though i was using amiibos to stock up on some things. the money situation was rough, too... a lot of things are cheaper to sell, but some armor is still really expensive plus you have to pay the great fairies to upgrade your equipment in addition to having the correct materials. that especially felt odd- having to grab a handful of (goddamn hard to get) lynel guts is hard enough to upgrade the soldier’s armor, but you want me to cough up 500 rupees, too??
(the scarcity of monster guts also got on my nerves, but i’ll just chalk that up to just some kind of really weird difficulty thing. it was annoying until i tracked down the stronger monsters.)
the story is probably the weakest part of the game to me. it’s really hard to have a baseline investment when you don’t care about these characters, anyway, and what i saw in this game’s story still failed to endear me to hardly any of them. link’s role frustrated me; he just comes off like a tool rather than a character this time through, he barely has any actual relevancy to the story segments beyond being the guy who can use the master sword and being the player’s vehicle to get from point a to b in the story. the blank stare and limited emoting worked in botw because... there’s a given reason for his lack of outward emotion in the past, plus he has no memory in the present. it makes sense. but this time around, he’s gotten memories in the years between this and the last game, but he just feels like a background character in most of the story beats.
he has no role in the memories and in the present just exists to gather some stuff for other people, he gets the master sword from zelda and then helps the other sages get their secret stones, but he’s barely addressed as his own character in the grand scheme of things unless he’s being directly spoken to. he’s just the swordsman capable of wielding the master sword and zelda’s chosen protector as far as the story is concerned. he has no opinions outside of doing what he’s told and looking for zelda. at least not as far as i could really tell. at least in botw, the story directly concerns him, and it’s his story we’re following. this time around zelda and the sages seem like the most important characters, link’s just... there, doing what he’s been told to.
the new sages are fine, none of them really endeared themselves to me, and i will say that making the player watch essentially the exact same cutscene each time you finish a dungeon was BAFFLING. they were long and you learned almost nothing new after the first one, and there was nothing done to make them very distinct to each individual pair of sages or their respective regions; at the very least, it could have been interesting to meet the ancient sages not in the exact same stone garden, but perhaps at the top of a snowy mountain for the rito, near a volcano or something for the goron, maybe in a shallow pool of water for the zora, and in the desert for the gerudo- but no, they’re all effectively the same thing just with the speaking character swapped out with some minor changes.
(the sages themselves are a pain in the ass to use, having to chase them down to activate their power or accidentally activating a power when you don’t want it; yunobo was honestly my favorite, but because i generally defaulted to having them all activated at all times, i had a lot of trouble with tulin blowing shit away from me when i was trying to grab it while midair. they’re half-decent for combat)
i didn’t really care for rauru or sonia, either. rauru in the present as a ghost was fine, he was kind of interesting and seemed to have changed from his time in the past, but he never managed to be a character i particularly liked. i wasn’t really a fan of his... arrogance? or something in the past scenes, and he never really came off as very interesting. sonia was nearly completely uninteresting which is a shame since she has an interesting design, she just felt delegated to the role of supporting rauru and zelda and then dying to motivate them.
ganondorf is a character i was really looking forward to seeing, and it really fucking sucks that he’s so god damn one-dimensional this time! the story can’t be fucked to delve into him beyond just giving us scenes that just tell us that he’s evil and wants to rule hyrule and get the secret stones and nothing else because fuck having complex villains, i guess. especially frustrating because within the game itself you can draw more interesting motivations up for him, but the game really just doubles-down on him being evil for the fuck of it and wanting to end the world because uhhhh... he’s evil don’t fucking worry about it
the ignoring of the triforce in this game sucks in that way, too, because the way the triforce works and how it can grant wishes made it a much more interesting goal for ganondorf to attain, rather than some poorly-named ‘secret stones’ that do nothing more than just amplify power or something. it sucks how black-and-white this damn story is and how it seems like it just wants to do away with any possible nuance or gray area. no one but the bad guys or side characters are flawed in any actually interesting or significant way.
at least ganondorf was still the most interesting character in the flashbacks.
and then zelda, oh god ZELDA. i honestly really liked her in botw. i liked how you saw her as a flawed, insecure, pressured teen, and how you saw her struggles to relate to link and how she eventually warmed up to him. you saw her as a flawed person who develops and as someone who cares deeply about her friends and her duties and gets frustrated by her failings.
and then in totk a lot of her more interesting traits- her interest in sheikah tech, her excitement over field study and research, her more defining traits as this incarnation of zelda- are basically sanded down and she’s just this perfect flawless princess with great power and an insanely passive role in the past beyond finally taking some kind of action after one of her friends dies and she’s pushed to the brink. cool. great.
she has practically no flaw in totk. if anyone in the present talks about her, they have nothing bad to say and just want to please her and follow her orders, she is right in telling the gerudo how to train their troops she is right even when misheard to tell people to put themselves in danger and she is hardly meaningfully questioned when her imposter is doing very clearly suspicious shit. neither the story nor any of the characters wants to let her be flawed. she’s just perfect in damn near every way and barely retains any interesting characterization she got in botw. there are some interesting snippets in her being a teacher and setting up memorials to those who died in the calamity, but there’s hardly any more than that, and it makes it really hard for me to give a damn about her. she’s not interesting this time.
the whole thing with zelda becoming a dragon too, is... it’s fine. it’s ok. but the fact that she turns back at the end with no problem whatsoever is one hell of a fucking misstep. why talk about draconification being forbidden for a good reason anyways if it doesn’t actually matter anyways??? if you never actually see any of those fucking repercussions why even bring them up??? i really feel like it would have been more effective for there to have been actual consequences for zelda beyond just fucking flying around half-conscious for a millennium or whatever- have her lose her memory when she’s brought back! there you go! there’s the reason why draconification is forbidden! there’s the thing about losing yourself! plus, zelda losing her memories as a result would mirror link having lost his memories in botw! that has so much more weight and significance then ‘oh uh ignore the warnings from a while back she’s completely fine dw abt it’ i hate that she’s back just like that without any of the consequences that the game suggests.
the dragon’s tears in general kinda just felt weaker than botw’s memories anyways bc you’re more just. watching stuff happen then actually learning anything. it has less characters and yet i feel like you only get to know like half of the important ones. like three of them are all about the same event. a few times they just replay parts of old memories in new ones. if they ever reference a past memory they just show you what they’re referencing instead of leaving you to piece it together. just play the voices or something don’t break the flow of things to play a clip of something i’ve already seen.
plus the fact that totk... barely acknowledges that it’s a sequel to botw really rubs me the wrong way. i understand that loz is extremely loose with its lore, but totk is a direct sequel set in the same world a few years later, and yet the events and characters of botw have might as well been forgotten and its all either ignored, brushed aside, or straight up replaced by something else for no good reason. the continuity between these games is absolutely dismal and to see the different ways in which the events and concepts or botw are just... disregarded really just left a bad taste in my mouth.
just- i love good stories and worlds in video games, and while some games can coast by for me by feeling good to play, having a good and engaging story and characters is usually essential to my enjoyment of a game, and when i don’t care about to the point of disliking the story and characters, and when none of the important areas are fascinating or distinct enough from each other, and when the game even fails to really reel me in with the gameplay...
i wanted to like totk, but it really just did not work for me. i just ended up feeling frustrated and disappointed and even sometimes bored with all of the major stuff and man. totk is really, REALLY, not for me, and it just left me wanting to play older zelda games instead.
...
HOWEVER! there were actually some things i really loved about totk! it’s not all doom and gloom! (well, not all doom, at least)
so! the music was great! not all of it really fit or made a lot of sense with the context in which they played or failed to evoke the feeling they were meant to, but the new tracks in this game were great! i especially love the first two phases of the fire temple’s theme, the depths music, and most of the new battle and boss themes. zelda games almost never fail when it comes to the music.
i did genuinely like the fire temple- yunobo’s ability was used the best in this dungeon, and it had the best five switches gimmick, i loved how you had to hit the gongs (sometimes having to construct a path to account for the weaknesses of yunobo’s ability) and how it then ‘scared’ each of the five statues holding a part of the gate- it was very cute and fit in very well with the general feel of that part of the story. it was the best in terms of difficulty and complexity, but it didn’t have the best boss- the lightning temple had the best boss, and i will admit that even if most of them were easy, i really enjoyed the mirror puzzles, as well as the process to unlocking the dungeon. the wind temple had my favorite visual identity and aesthetic, though, i liked it being a part of this old rito song, and how it was the most distinct in looks from the other dungeons.
the sky islands were honestly fun, even if they weren’t all that interesting. getting to some of the harder-to-reach islands were some of my favorite times i had to use ultrahand, and stuff like the zonai forge island and the one orblike island with the mirror puzzle, and pretty much all of the more complicated parts of the sky islands were a lot of fun to explore and figure out.
being able to ride on the dragons was just really cool, and the fact that they come out of the chasms was fun.
the new horns for the monsters were cool, it helps differentiate the different monster strengths and i just thought they were really neat.
the quest with lurelin village was fun, even if the pirates just being monsters was a real let-down.
the stable trotters were also a fun bunch of characters, that was a good, new way to open up fairy fountains.
all of the new stuff with the yiga was really fun, like getting their outfit and being able to pretend to be one of them and learning the blademaster attack- so much fun it was so cute.
most of the new outfits are really good and useful, and while a bit janky and not that great, the house-building bit near tarrey was endearing.
while none of the main characters interested me, i really, especially liked tauro and yona and penn. for some reason they just appealed to me and i really wish they had bigger parts in the game because they’re interesting and they have good designs and i’d really like to know more about them.
the underground gerudo shelter was pretty cool, to be honest, and the look of the caves was really cool.
i adored the proving grounds shrines- easily my favorite shrines in the entire game, i had no problem spending a decent amount of time in those kinds of shrines, they were fantastic.
the new ingredients and recipes and new weapons were cool.
the way you basically return to the area you started at on your way to ganondorf is pretty cool, that whole path is really neat.
ganondorf in general was a pretty cool boss, even if he ended up being kind of easy for me. the whole final boss sequence was neat.
by FAR, though, my absolute favorite part of this game was 100% the depths. the fact that there was just an entire second layer to the map that was the same size as the surface, just inverted and dark and filled with new bosses and locations... i spent hours down there without going back up to the surface and absolutely had a BLAST screwing around in the dark, lighting up my path with brightblooms and tossing together little vehicles with lights so that i could get to the next lightroot off in the distance. the depths was probably where i ended up using zonai vehicles the most, and it was honestly pretty fun to go around spotting and reaching every lightroot, coming across different mines and weird little landforms and coliseums and yiga camps. the music and plantlife and look of the depths were so good, and it really felt distinct from the rest of the game in a very good way. doing all of the lightroots and getting enough zonaite to max out link’s energy cells was definitely a good move since it made finding shrines and dealing with later zonai machine stuff easier.
overall, tears of the kingdom was a severely mixed bag for me, and while there was stuff i did like, i don’t think it’s enough to really get me to say that i really liked this game overall- after all most of the stuff i disliked was unavoidable parts of the games, and it definitely put a hamper on my interest in the rest of the time. totk is fine, but it’s really not my thing.
#i just- *slams head into brick wall* bro i did not have a good time with this game#going back to my silly little comparison point; totk was $70 and my copy of phantom hourglass was $70#$70 is a bullshit amount for a game but thats no the point here#totk from a technical baseline standpoint as a GAME is worth $70#its story and the amount of enjoyment it gave me was not worth $70 tho. the story and enjoyment i got from ph was more worth $70 to me#salty talks#loz#legend of zelda#totk#'zelda games almost never fail when it comes to the music' if you talk shit abt ph's soundtrack i'll kill you. i like the dungeon track#i partially have the shinji chair image saved for this but i did also initally save it yesterday when i finished nge#listen this was fine on a surface level but it just wore me the fuck down#link was just some flavor of stonefaced or surprised or determined in any given cutscene and like. idk. wasnt too interested in him either#look i know about the silly little dialogue options. still didnt do it for me#link getting his arm back only makes sense to me bc i got every last light of blessing and heart container and stamina vessel#the gloom in his body is 100% gone hes squeaky clean for me. whyd you take his shirt off tho. at least keep his hat. cant take it seriously#put him in the archaic set or smth his arm is fully visible that way at least and its full circle thats what he wears at the start#couldnt take the whole grabbing zelda sequence seriously bc i missed the (hold) prompt and link flew away lol#totk spoilers#also wasnt really a fan of most of the voice acting yeah sorry. kinda rough all around aside from like ganondorf and dimitri- i mean rauru#mineru and the rito sage were fine too ig. im not going to bother watching any vids or whatever to check again#riju and sidon were fine too#sonia was cool too but everyone else was a lil rough tbh esp with having to say 'secret stone' that name sucks shit#my switch died in the middle of the credits. i had like 25% when i started fighting ganondorf.#it died twice actually cuz i charged it for a few minutes and what like yeah 5% should be good and nope. died again#anyways whatever. im not giving it a rating im tired of this game i dont think i'll be replaying or even just touching it any time soon#music was top notch again tho. made me feel stuff more than the actual story did. cool ig#bitching abt totk
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WAH
BY WHICH I MEAN I got tagged in one of those Last Line Games like two weeks ago by @abysskeeper and uh never noticed bc I never check my mentions oops
anyways it’s supposed to be the last line of your WIP but I’m feeling vain today so you’re getting like a few last lines from a few different WIPs that probably won’t see the light of day for several years
so uh here’s one from a KH:COM rewrite/au bc I was having Namine Feelings last night
[It’s just information, Namine thinks, brushing away the guilt. It’s just data. It’s just a story. A story she’s telling with a friend, that’s all. A story where they are friends; a story where she’s the only friend that matters. Her hand stills, and the guilt in her stomach twists into something like longing. Wistfulness. Nostalgia for something that hadn’t actually happened.
It could have happened, she thinks. It will have happened, she thinks further. She looks up towards the locked door of her room, and the tiny hope she’d clung to so carefully sours instantly
It has to have happened, she thinks with finality, and she picks up her pencils once more.]
here’s a potential line from an After sequel in which Speedrun!Link tries his hardest to explain to Zelda how he got there so fast
[There are no common signs for how Link managed to make it to the castle so quickly. He starts somewhere in common, then jumps to Hylian by way of Zora and Goron in some weird mish-mash, and really Zelda would have been more impressed with how many different languages he had muscle memory of had he not been describing something utterly ludicrous.]
aaaaaaand finally a piece from a KH:BBS rewrite/au because I have just so many thoughts about why the fuck Pete got banished + reminiscing on Mickey’s Magical Quest for the SNES
[”Nows see here, your Majesty. Isn’t this a touch too far?”
��You kidnapped me, Pete,” Minnie said coldly.
“All part of a sting operation against the Beagle Boys.”
“You stole my dog,” Mickey protested in utter indignation.
“Heresay.”
“Pete you can’t just say that, I was literally there, I saw you-” With every word Mickey’s voice jumped in octave.
Pete, for his part, gave the mouse a long, annoyed look. “I liked you better when you didn’t speak.”
“Guards!” Minni snapped, “Get him out of my sight.”]
anyways don’t expect the KH ones to come out any time soon as they’re part of a uh Self Indulgent Whole Series Rewrite Magnum Opus because I’m God Apparently and have decided to replay all the games and take extensive notes on everything because I’m a Scholar (I do have a handful of scene sketches for almost all of the games if you ever want a peek under the hood though lol)
the BOTW one is likely quicker, assuming I don’t write something for TOTK first oops
and uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh @unironicallycringe and the rest of the Fanfiction Book Club I have forgotten your various handles but you’re all invited to play!
#last line#the captain is speaking#god I haven't used that tag in forever#anyways#I'm VoidGobbo on ao3 if you wanna read my 1 fic lol#feel free to ask me things about the various fics!! I've got these and a few jnd ones locked and loaded
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God damn, but “Tears of the Kingdom” has to be the best game ever. I finally beat it after a bitch of a final boss fight with Ganondorf, but it was worth it. What an absolutely incredible piece of art this game was. A true masterpiece. The story was so moving, and the ending, with Link finally reaching Zelda and holding onto her as they plummet to the earth, was just so beautiful and cinematic, bringing the beginning and the end full circle. They were both the hero’s of this game, their combined effort being what ultimately won the day. I think, more than ever, and I’ve seen others say this too, you could feel the bond between Link and Zelda, and how much they truly, genuinely love and care for each other in this game. Link’s concern for Zelda was clear as day at the end, his desperation and need to catch her this time. One could read so much into that, into his sense of guilt over having failed to back at the beginning, as her chosen protector, as the hero who’s meant to keep her safe. You just get the sense that Link and Zelda really are best friends in this game, and it’s really beautiful. My hats off to Nintendo. I would say it’s a toss up between “ToTK” and “RE4″ for game of the year, but you have to give the edge to “ToTK” just based on it being fully original I think. But both games were the most fun I’ve had in a long, long time. Probably since “Breath of the Wild”, also game of the year. But these two entries in the Zelda franchise rank among the best, imo. If any game deserved a sequel, it was “BoTW”, and they matched it in every way. I can’t praise this game enough. Ugh, now I’m sad that it’s over though. I’ll just have to play it again, lol. Of course, there’s a million side quests I can still do, so maybe I’ll occupy myself with that for a while.
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Hi Holly, my favourite favourite author! 👋
I came to poke you with some interaction stick. You can ignore me ^__-
BUT, if you are ok with answering a few Get To Know The Author questions:
What is the first Zelda game you've ever played?
Hopes about TOTK?
Do you have a book that you think impacted you the most? Or one that you think back to most often (can be a fanfic)?
Favourite fanfic of course ^^?
Oh my god this is so sweet, little old ME??? Of course I will answer best I can <3
1. The first ever Zelda game I played was the DS games, Phantom Hourglass and Spirit Tracks. My Nan was a very big fan and I have fond memories of sitting in her kitchen and playing the games and she loved helping me with all the boss fights. I know they aren’t the best games in the series, however, they hold a lot of nostalgia for me. I never did complete them though, I just watched my Nan do it instead.
2. Oo that’s a good one. One of my main hopes for TOTK is to see a really well developed story. I know that’s super basic but one of the things I loved so much about BOTW was the memories and characters, so I really hope there’s some sort of memory adjacent gameplay that develops the characters more. Also, I kind of got tired of shrines in BOTW so I’m hoping for something new to explore in this game. But my main hope isn’t anything too specific other than a good game. What I want might not be what fits, so I just hope the years of waiting are worth it!
3. A book that genuinely impacted and stayed with me was Little Women. The narrative of following four strong, unique, and amazing woman through a little domestic life really made me reflect on myself. I’m a child of five (much like Quentin) and it made me think about what relationships like that mean. It made me want to write about domestic relationships and environments as much as others. The Book Thief by Markus Zusak is another, which is a story narrated by death. It has a one line at the end: “I am haunted by humans.” and I think there is so much beauty and wonder in that. The idea of ‘humans’ can mean so much, and it always sticks with me when I write. And I can’t not talk about my favourite, albeit very sad, book. A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness. It’s a shorter novel but it’s so beautiful. It tells the meaning of letting go even when you don’t want to, and acknowledging how you feel. My favourite quote ever from that book is: “I wish I had a hundred years. A hundred years I could give to you.” And that book has just stuck with me.
4. Omg favourite fan fiction is so hard. I go through so many hyper-fixations. One that I always come back to is this fan fiction called Sorcerers Bane by BeautifulFiction for the Merlin Fandom. I remember reading it like crazy and nothing has topped that mad rush to finish it since. I can’t believe that fandom is still alive today tbh.
Thank you for the great questions, the ask made me all happy it’s so cool to have people interested, I get all flustered. Never feel like you’re bothering me haha I will always answer :)
I hope those answered your questions!!
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