#but either way that's also kinda shit

[ganondoodle]

so im not sure if anyones interested, but, i went through quite a bunch of totk critiques by people who were also very disappointed with it and thought id share my favorite videos i found (granted, i only really wachted those that youtube recommened and its mostly .. white men... things like the orientalism problem are not mentioned at all for example, maybe ill update this post if i find any more diverse voices)

i dont agree with every single point and also dont know most of the channels (aside from the big zelda theory guys) so i judged solely by what they mentioned in those videos and the quality of it (like the audio .. bc i cant listen to bad audio)

in no particular order, also they talk about or use footage of the literal ending stuff so if you arent done with the game yet, better leave these for now

(the following one is a podcast thing by multiple zelda theory guys, there some stuff you can skip at the start thats just kidna random things, but the video is marked with chapters)

(theres some mention of some things not making sense, like the sonau only being two, and ithink thats kinda bc the english translation was weirdly vague about that, in the german version its much more directly said that they all died out and only rauru and mineru were left of them;

also mentions of how unfitting it is to call the enigma stones "secret"stones in english might come from a similar thing; in german they where called "Mysterienstein" which would be translated as mystic/mysterious/enigma- stone

just wanted to mention that since the vast majority are gonna play it in english only and the stuff online is also dominated by english)

[ladybugboots]

let me help you

[kierancaz]

I’m feeling depressed so yk what I’m going to do ? Talk about Damian Wayne and hope it fixes me.

So like I made a post before talking a little bit about (mostly) Damian and Jon’s like features and relationship to Lizzie and what’s I’ve seen from screenshots and stuff from Wonder Woman 2023 but I wanna talk more about Damian specifically.

It’s kinda annoying that it seems like his feature of becoming Batman is sealed when they basically made a character who should be anyone BUT Batman.

Damian was created IN CANON (at least according to one of his backstories, idk if it’s canon in the current continuity tho or if they retconned it by now) to one day replace Bruce and to one day be the leader of the League of Assassins.

He literally has always had some sort of role he was destined to fill whether he wanted it or not. Some sort of role that he was being forced into not just by the narrative and the writers but by his literal parents (not really Bruce but yk).

Damian’s story should be similar to Dick’s. He should find himself outside of some preexisting mantle because he doesn’t have to be what other people tell him he is. He doesn’t have to follow on his father’s or his mother’s footsteps. He gets to be his own person, his own hero.

And yah I know in his Robin solo that was kinda his arc of finding himself away from his family and all that but in the end he still is Robin. He should have an arc (in many years after he’s done being Robin or something) where he goes off and becomes his own hero that’s not Batman just like what Nightwing did. And I think it would work and make sense also from like a relationship standpoint, Damian would be more likely to follow in Dicks footsteps than he would be to follow in Bruce’s.

Idk tho bc like, he’s probably just going to be Robin for forever now and he’s only going to be used as Batman in like future set comics or something but like ugh idk I just want him to make his own destiny and not be what everyone tells him he has to be.

[zebratimw]

[fishyartist]

Danny phantom episode “Girls night out” deserves more hate. Like it’s the worst of season 3’s shift into more generic superhero cartoon plot lines imo, it’s gender politics are noxious. Something about the art is especially not working for me. ember and spectra should be trying to maul each other.

[klonoadoortophantomile]

uhhhhbbhhhhh shitty art dump cuz i kinda hate posting art individually 👍

[dappy-dappernette]

Gonna be real with y'all ppl who say "G-rita is canon" are the most annoying mofos in this fandom /hj

[ruthlesslistener]

It's been so long, but I just want to get this off my chest cause what you dis really messed me up to this day.

Being accused of being a pedophile over headcanoning that a small creature whose form is that of a mysterious goo is an adult really ruined my experience with the Hollow Knight community and myself. I saw Ghost as a little sanrio character cause as an Asian who grew up in an Asian country, I was surrounded by little mascot characters whose height did not tell their age at all. You were one of my fave fic writers out there before all this, so seeing you sprout how people like me who have different headcanons are someone dangerous really messed me up as a survivor of abuse. I'm not telling you this to harass you like what your followers may insist cause last I checked they coddled you so much during this time, I'm telling you this cause you ruined one of my special interests with your redtagging. I hope you are happy. I think you pretty much rekindled one of my triggers too: Seeing popular fanfic writers redtag and harass others over headcanons.

Gonna block you again, but I'm just going to say this once: please be kind to others and remember that shit like this isn't enough to say someone is a predator. It just creates and breeds harassment and a person like you with thousands of followers should know better and be more responsible.

Anon, I truly am sorry that my reaction had such a profoundly negative effect on you. That was not my intention and I am genuinely distressed that I caused you such upset. If it helps, this experience actually did greatly sour my experience with the fandom as well, because I did not intend to have that effect and I did not want that effect. I was very, very tempted to simply delete my blog and start all over again specifically to erase any sort of concept of 'authority' that I might have in the fandom space, because the simple thought that someone might take my personal opinions and use them as an excuse to harass others just because I write fanfiction in my free time nearly gave me a panic attack. This isn't to draw the attention off of the fact that I hurt you- this is to drive home the fact that I am not in this fandom to be popular and there is nothing that I say that should be treated as word of god or used to harass others. I should not have that sort of power. Nor do I want it. It honestly makes my skin crawl and if I could wipe my name from everyone's minds while also leaving my work out there for others to find, then I would.

However, I never thought that you specifically were a pedophile, and I was in the wrong to say something that could be constructed as such. I spoke without thinking and without understanding that there was that headcanon beyond unsavory characters in the first place, my interactions with which greatly tarnished my perception of the headcanon because I didn't know any better. Genuinely- I went and asked the people I know in discord (who were likely most of those fans that 'coddled' me), and they told me I was wrong and all the ways that I was wrong, which gave me a big 'oh shit' moment. That's why I shifted my argument to simply explaining why I didn't like it- because yeah, I still fucking don't, but to me it's about as impactful as if someone likes pie vs cake. This shit, at the end of the day, isn't real. It's pixels on a screen and drawing on paper. When I spoke about how it left a bad taste in my mouth and how I had poor experiences with it in the past, that was about a personal bias and experience talking about a broad concept, not anyone specifically. Just because I considered it a red flag due to prior experiences, as stated, does not mean that it is a certainty of danger. I do not at all think that ones fictional preferences are honest indicators of the type of people they are in real life, just indicators that they're people I wouldn't get along with.

(fuckin hell, I'm fucking riddled with red flags myself- just look at my propensity for gore and tragedy and dark, violent media. That's as much of a red flag as what I was talking about before, but I can't handle the imagery of the other for reasons I can't explain other than irrational brain stuff. I also fully expect other people to look at the shit I'm into with disgust and mistrust and to block me on sight- there's plenty of people I've never interacted with who've done that already. Can't blame them for that.)

As for the thing about Ghost being similar to Asian mascots- I genuinely had no idea that was even a thing. I understand that I am biased in this regard. I was raised in a western country who has very different means of telling stories than eastern ones, and not only that, I also grew up in a very closeted-in all forms of the world-household. I didn't have any access to media other than what my local library had until I was around 11, and that was pretty much limited to fanfiction and googling all the shit that my parents banned from me. So I made zero connection to the sort of cutesy mascots in Asian cultures and Ghost until you brought that point up just now. My apologies again on that one, it's genuinely a blind spot on my part and had I known that before I certainly would have taken that into account.

However- and I'm also saying this as someone who has also encountered abuse (though admittedly a very different kind, so I cannot understand nor will pretend to understand that I know how you feel): please also understand that there will be many instances in your life where people trigger you by accident, and they have no idea that they did so until you point it out. This does not mean that they were deliberately trying to harm you. In this case, I was not at all trying to target you specifically- I don't even know you. I had no idea that what I said was an honest-to-god trigger because the whole time I was operating under the assumption that I was talking about something being 'fucking gross' the same way that lasagna is fucking gross, not as in 'I think everyone who thinks this way are genuinely dangerous people'. That's also why I responded so defensively, and why people who knew what I meant came to defend me- because from my perspective, I was talking casually, and then was getting angry replies back about something I did not mean, which felt like I was having words being put into my mouth. And that is a trigger for me as well. Which made it an even bigger fucking mess.

(There is also- and I will now fully admit to this now bc fuck I'm tired of fucking around with these goddamn arbitrary social media rules- a desire to keep antis off my back by playing up my disgust and vitrol to the subject. I've been at the center of their harassment and nearly lost friends bc of people labeling me a proshipper, so I figured the safe way to deal with it is to simply overflaunt a preexisting disgust response so that people don't attack me or accuse me of being something I'm not again.)

I triggered you. I did not know that, but that is not an excuse. You, however, also triggered me, which made the whole mess even worse. Let me explain- I grew up as an autistic child in a highly confrontational household, with a parent who would either deliberately set up scenarios that I would fail at or look for reasons to get angry at so he could blow up at me, yelling abuse and sometimes resorting to physical violence. Because I was the eldest who was supposed to be 'responsible' and 'a good role model' to my younger siblings, this meant that I was second in line for him to take out his anger on. He put words in my mouth and implications I did not mean all the time just so that he wouldn't feel bad later about backing me into a corner, destroying my possessions, and threatening to kill my pets if he did not outright hit me (which he only ever held back on because he was afraid of someone finding the marks and him being taken to jail). Me crying or apologizing only ever made him angrier, but getting angry and aggressive in return made it blow over quicker. So did trying to explain myself, because it at least let me verbally work over that the response I got was irrational. That was why I responded so defensively when I got put into a similar situation here, which is something that I somewhat regret but also do not entirely feel terrible about because how the fuck else was I supposed to respond when I kept explaining myself and you did not listen to me.

We're both human. Humans are messy and flawed. I am not someone that you should look up to or hold on a pedestal in any way because of this, nor should anyone else- I'm literally just a 23 year old guy who's obsessed enough with a story to write stories based on it in my free time, not some sage or king or god. I did not call you a pedophile personally for thinking that a fuckload of pixels I thought was a child wasn't, and when I was explaining why I don't like it, I was explaining my personal bias, not some tried-and-true gospel of divining the true meaning of fiction over something that is- as we just proved- incredibly difficult to discuss due to how subjective it is. I still maintain that my discomfort is very real and that it has a genuine basis in my own experiences, but that doesn't mean that it's valid or any more morally pure than yours. At the end of the day, it's not real, and the actual reason why I dragged this whole dilemma on for so long was because of the nature of the discussion itself throwing up all my self-defense actions rather than anything else. If I knew that it was a genuine trigger instead of fandom wank, and if I stopped getting asks in the first place, then I would have shut the fuck up a long time ago.

Def. recommend keeping me blocked, because while I certainly wouldn't mind reconciliation of a sort, I also think that our triggers overlap and that's not something that either of us should have to deal with. And I'm not talking about the Ghost headcanon either, because I no longer have that shitty knee-jerk reaction of 'oh god another cringe porn artist' to it, and- believe it or not!- have friends who are into completely different interpretations and ships and the like that I personally really dislike that I am also completely chill with because its my irrational meat brain that's the problem. I'm talking about the fact that when you're triggered, you get defensive and start jumping to conclusions (not unfounded ones btw) that unfortunately triggers my own defensive responses because jumping to conclusions is a stupid-niche trigger for me in turn. Shit's not good for either of us and I think you'd be way better off without me in your life.

And again, I really am very sorry that you thought I called you a pedophile. As I have said before, that was not my intention, and I have never believed that. I also will straight-up fight anyone who takes my irrational kneejerk dislike reaction and uses it to attack you, because that was ALSO not what I intended in the slightest and the thought of someone using my inability to shut up about my special interests as a means of 'word-of-god-ing' my likes and dislikes into fandom wank makes me want to hurl.

[suffarustuffaru]

rating some rezero ships by um. how good they could cover up murder together

(feel free to read my tags for some explanations T^T)

[llitchilitchi]

people always complain about a story not making sense because they refuse to read the notes and stuff found around in the world and call it bad game design, but when a story has a lot of exposition in dialogue its bad writing because its exposition dump, and when the notes and dialogue are made to be minimal so people can only learn the lore they feel like learning the story is "badly delivered" because it was not spoon-fed to us? just say you hate spending time learning the lore and go

[jorvikzelda]

I started reading Lord of the Rings (bought Fellowship of the Ring like… last spring but never got around to starting) and I’d just like to say. Holy fuck what a slow book. You mean to tell me I’m over a hundred pages in and this man is only just leaving the Shire? Sign me up for MORE I love this shit. Tolkien said “I will take exactly as much time as I want to describe things and you will like it”. AND I DO

[thiscatiscreepy]

[VD: a crudely drawn picture of a stick figure lying in bed at night, with bags under their eyes. In their thought bubble is a clip from the movie Spirited. The clip is the song "Bringing Back Christmas". End VD]

[that-ineffable-devil]

I...need some input, guys (gn). Some outside perspective.

My mother's husband is in liver failure. Like "added to the transplant list as an emergency" failure. Considering his track record, I don't know how he's making it on the list, but regardless there are rising medical bills.

Now for some VERY simplified backstory:

The Husband: my mother married this man after I was a full grown adult with a kid of my own and I've spent very little time with him. What time I HAVE spent with him has alternated between genial/amusing to "I blocked his prejudiced ass so he'd leave me alone." I haven't spoken to him in over 5 years and generally can't stand him. But I don't want him to die.

The Mother: I only spent the first 7 or 8 years of my life with my mother, and most of those memories are repressed under a thick haze of trauma. We're talking "even the memories I do have aren't in any chronological order and I can't remember how old I was when they happened" kind of repression. My most vivid memories of my mother that don't include physical trauma are when she'd call me (when I was a kid) in the middle of the night, drunk, to either apologize/explain that she wasn't that bad of a mom or yell at me for being spoiled and abandoning her. She claims not to remember these events.

We've tried a few times in my adult life to reconnect, but it always goes sour quite quickly. When I came out to her as trans, she immediately rejected the idea and started sending me "transition regret" videos from YouTube and calling my grandmother to yell at her for supporting me.

I told her off and she stopped that. Ever since, she's pretended like nothing happened and started sending me funny videos as if to bridge the gap she created decades ago, while I've been pushing further away because, at this point, I don't want her in my life at all. I don't want to put in the effort when I know I'll only end up hurt in the end.

But then her husband got sick. And just like when I was a little kid, I feel obligated to be there for her. To hold her hand and support her because, I guess, I don't hate her. I don't like her. I don't even know if I really love her. But I don't hate her, and I DO hate when people are hurting.

Then yesterday, she messages me out of the blue asking me to create a GoFundMe for her husband's medical bills. I haven't read the whole message because I don't know how I'm going to respond yet, but I'm feeling really gross about it. She makes very little money, I know, and I don't think he's worked the entire time they've been married, and I know he doesn't have insurance. Maybe it's a moot point, because I feel like if my grandmother finds out, she'll pressure me into doing it, too, and I have an even harder time telling her no.

So, I guess, tl;dr: My transphobic and emotionally manipulative parent wants me to create a GoFundMe for her dying husband's medical bills for reasons, and I'm not sure I want to since I'm trying to go no contact, but I feel obligated to help her because the man is dying and she's suffering. What do I do here? Am I a horrible person for even hesitating?

[widevibratobitch]

me when im obsessed with dead singers from 50 (well... mostly 70-120) years ago and im heartbroken to know i'll never see them on stage... never hear them breathe, never see them sweat, never even touch the hem of their garment...

it really is enough to drive a person mad...

[saturdaynightghostclub]

Literally do not even mind me, just yelling at clouds, but I’m not playing when I say I actually need everyone on the bookish internet to read at least one essay, short story, novel, etc by Ursula K. Le Guin before you complain about how there’s no good fantasy or science fiction these days.

She will ruin your life and your ability to consume genre fiction without seriously interrogating its motives, but I can guarantee you she will put a name to the thing that’s been bothering you and you will finally know why you’re having a hard time with contemporary fantasy.

[waywardsalt]

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.