#i still haven't played botw or totk

[prankprincess123]

Why didn't anyone tell me that the background music for each of the divine beast 'dungeons' is S.O.S. in morse code that is then drowned out by S.A.D. instead!!!

Cause I was just listening to LoZ music while doing my homework, and now I'm bawling!

Like the S.O.S. in Vah Medoh is SO frantic and how much immediate danger and pain must Revali have been in to openly express being so scared and panicked!!!!!!!

And in Vah Ruta the S.O.S. starts relatively calm and then grows more and more and more desperate as the song goes on, and Mipha in no way deserved that kind of growing terror in her last moments!!!!!

And the rhythm of the S.O.S. calls in both Vah Naboris and Vah Rudania sound so resigned, as if both Urbosa and Daruk had accepted their fates before sending the calls

And listening to the songs you can hear each of the champions' final battles as they fight, desperately beg for help, and then are drowned out by the 'seek and destroy' message overriding their distress calls

And I'm now sobbing

[tittyinfinity]

[tortilla-of-courage]

mmmnmgngh.... zelda

[sniperct]

acquired starfield and put about an hour into it so far, finished the first research outpost with the pirates then rescued a little outpost nearby

love the music, looks good and plays well on my PC

it still feels like fallout, but the combat and movement is a bit better. enemies feel spongey

spaceship flying kind of sucks and is very simplified but I wasn't expecting anything complicated or simmy, this isn't star citizen.

And I found a program to map my joystick and we'll see if that helps. I'm okay with arcadey flying in games but it's waaaay more fun with a flightstick. (I play war thunder in arcade battles with one, lots more fun than using a mouse and keyboard. One day I'll graduate to more realistic battles)

Anyway first impressions a solid 7/10, but we'll see how long I go before I get bored like I do with almost every one of bethesda's games. I'm intrigued by the story but they aren't known for solid main story telling

[kyuohki]

Does anyone want infodumping on my Zelda OC and the worldbuilding I've made around her?? I've been typing up so much stuff, trying to get it into a coherent structure for potential fic (and holy shit is there so much info....this has been in the works since the 90s!)

[humanmorph]

games to finish this year:

- outer wilds ✅ (i will have to look at a guide finally even though i DONT LIKE IT) I wish I'd done this sooner (just gotten help). Incredible game

- kentucky route zero (i never played the final episode when it released and at this point i might aswell start over)

- BREATH OF THE WILD ✅ (I SHOULD. DO THIS TODAY ACTUALLY. did this. it took an embarassingly short amount of time what with me having everything fully upgraded) 

[tsvai]

i done it +w+

ready for tears of the kingdom in may

[boilingrain]

I'm genuinely having fun with this game.

Anyways I want to put Venti in a salad spinner (affectionate)

[lilyblossom-art]

I drew all of the Links from the games that I've played so far :>

This was honestly such a pain but I managed to push through fghjjgj for some reason i decided to be very weird with the lineart i can't even explain it-

Also don't mind me trying to figure out how to like, sign my stuff i dunno

I didn't know wether i should start with him or with botw Link since my first game was tfh and not albw. But as you can see I decided to start with albw Link

Ik totk isn't out yet but I still put it here cuz why not. I'm so used to drawing this Link because he used to be one of the only characters I would draw for a really long time haha

I don't have anything to say about this one fgjzihhjk

This drawing has to be my least favorite of the bunch. For some reason whenever I try to draw ss Link I mess it up somehow :< my poor sweet boi didn't deserve this

Okay I kinda cheated with this one because I have only played la so far but I just really wanted to draw pink haired Link fgizhgkk

I don't really like this one either, it's better than ss Link but still kinda wonky. I really need to work on my faces, especially forward facing ones. I also cheated again bc I haven't finished taol yet :>

[am-i-the-asshole-official]

am i the asshole for not lending my uncle my copy of zelda tears of the kingdom?

i (17f) have two uncles which are relevant to this story, both maternal. they're the oldest and youngest (not sure exactly how old, one is around 30 and the other is in his late 40s/early 50s.)

last year, the older uncle lent me his copy of zelda breath of the wild. this was after about a year and a half of him having it. during that time he made sure i was well aware how difficult and lengthy it was, which was why he couldn't give it to me to play yet. i don't profess to be a gamer or anything- i just enjoy playing videogames, and i didn't really know what the zelda series was at the time, so i kind of just shrugged it off. when he finally did give it to me, it was after i let his kids borrow my personal copy of animal crossing, and he kind of just stuck the cartridge into my hand while i was leaving and insisted i take it.

i was and still am a student, and just didn't have the time to start casually playing until a few months later in the spring, around may. i really enjoyed it and got 75% of the way through by the time summer vacation rolled around, which was when my cousin (his son) started dropping by to ask when i would be giving zelda back. i told him every day for three consecutive days that i would give it back when i was finished, but he was really anxious to start playing because my uncle only lets them have their nintendo switch in the summer. i offered my cousin his selection of any game we had (as we have done multiple times). he said he'd already played all of our games and that a couple of the newer ones my brother had gotten for his birthday were "trashy" and left.

the fourth time he came over he basically stood in the doorway and demanded the zelda game, said it was his dad's, and that he'd give it back when he finished it. my mom scolded him because of his attitude, saying that my uncle mostly just borrows whatever games they want to play from us for up to a year and a half at a time, and we never complain. she told me to go get the game and give it to him, and he started crying and left before i could. my uncle came over ten minutes later to smooth things over and left with botw. he never gave it back and i never got to finish it.

back in around november, my younger uncle, who is unmarried and has no kids, gifted me zelda botw and totk, specifically because he'd heard about what happened with my older uncle. when my older uncle found out at thanksgiving, he asked me to give totk to him. i told him i was busy with college apps and haven't opened it yet and he said it was fine, and that he would play it and give it back in a few days. i refused, saying that i wanted to open my own game when i wasn't busy, and my mom, who was also there, agreed with me and said that i deserved the experience of opening a present and enjoying it on my own time. he tried a few more times to convince me unsuccessfully and eventually relented.

two months ago i opened botw and am making very slow progress on it because i just don't have the time to finish it as quick as i'd like. totk is still in the plastic on my dresser. a few days ago my uncle messaged me asking for totk, and i ignored it. my mom told me just to tell him i already lent it to someone, but today he turned up on my porch while i was waiting to go to school and asked me for it, and in my exasperation i said, "i haven't even opened it yet." he again told me to let HIM open it and that "he'd give it back in three days after finishing it," and just to let him have it. i told him no. and then i told him no several more times. at one point he got annoyed and said, "fine, be like that," and walked away.

some additional context: my uncle is not broke. he makes six figures and has a very good engineering job. he bought a ps5 almost as soon as it came out. he makes the conscious choice not to purchase his own games, i guess because he feels no need to when he could just borrow them from us instead? my family doesn't make a lot of money but my mom saves up so we can have games, usually as birthday or holiday gifts. i have never borrowed a game from him except botw because he doesn't have any to lend. i also feel like if he really wanted zelda totk that bad he could just buy it himself, because he can definitely afford it. my mom, maternal aunt, and cousins (not his kids) are all on my side, and my aunt says that my younger uncle doesn't like my older uncle and would be pissed if i lent them to him. on the other hand i just feel bad for holding out and being difficult because i want to open it on my own time, and i even though i don't like him as a person i still feel guilty for being rude to and pissing him off because he's my mom's oldest sibling.

so, aita for not lending it to him?

What are these acronyms?

[comicaurora]

Botw/totk ask(mild spoilers who haven't played the games)

Where do you think link (and the other people who have the purah pad*cough dagger flashback cough*) go when they warp? Bc the blue partial effect still goes "up" from where ever they warp from(including the highest points in the games) and "down" at wherever they warp to.

There isn't a directional pull towards shrines or towers in the animations, and in the flashback there weren't any built yet (or at least I don't recall seeing)

Realistically they probably just beam up and over without going through any sort of central node, but I have just concocted a theory I like way more: when Mineru says she thinks she can get the Purah pad's warp functionality working in the past, she does so by constructing a sky island (which we already know she can do, since she raises the flower islands and the ring ruins) that serves as a relay hub, essentially a satellite far above Hyrule. This being Zonai technology it lasts pretty much forever, and via stable time loop shenanigans becomes the mechanism through which the Sheikah warp in the future without ever knowing it's what they're tapping into.

[tally-ace]

So one of my all-time favorite ways to play through botw is without teleporting. I adore the additional challenge it brings and it adds a certain level of planning ahead and requires you to become familiar with the layout of the world and locations of things.

I've been upset to find out through testing that a TRUE teleport-less run of totk is impossible thanks to the tutorial island. So I have yet to try a "partial" one to see if it's still as fun as in botw.

(EDIT: I've heard conflicting things saying it's possible to get to the fourth tutorial shrine without teleporting? I haven't tried it myself but when I say true run I also mean without exploits. If you need to do some precise exploit of the game to make a run like that work, it isn't really that fun for me anymore. I'll attempt a teleport-less tutorial island one day so we'll see)

I have, however, found a fun way to play totk through accident on my second playthrough.

In botw, it is impossible to finish all 120 shrines without completing each of the four divine beasts. That's because there are exactly 4 shrines (1 in each region) that only become available after completing a shrine quest that does not unlock until after the respected divine beast is cleared.

(EDIT: Correction, there are exactly 2 shrines that are inaccessible without the completion of their respected divine beast. So all the shrines in the game can be completed with the minimum completion of 2 divine beasts. These shrines are the warbler's nest shrine in rito and the sand seal race shrine in gerudo. I mistakenly believed an npc for a shrine in goron did not spawn until after rudania and that the ceremonial trident did not spawn until after ruta (my searching skills are abyssmal and I missed both those things on my playthroughs prior to the beasts lol))

In totk, NONE of the shrines are dependent on the completion of a dungeon to access. All save for ONE SINGLE QUEST in Eldin that requires Yunobo's sage ability to access the shrine.

AND through the heart container granted after completing the tutorial, the heart containers granted after completion of the rito, gerudo, zora, and goron dungeons, and choosing the heart container granted by the bargainer statue beneath the great plateau... You can unlock the door to the underground dungeon without spending a single spirit orb.

Meaning that the only required story progression beats in totk to witness 80% of the (non-flashback) cutscenes with link as a silly little fucked up beast is getting the paraglider and getting up to the point in the goron story line to have Yunobo as a companion. Also meaning that every dungeon in totk can be completed without spending spirit orbs beyond the tutorial.

Playing through totk on a mission to get every shrine without upgrading health or stamina ONCE is more fun than I ever thought it would be. I had a BLAST. As someone who thinks the building mechanic is neat, but not really made for me, it made me interact with a mechanic that I never really enjoyed and find something to appreciate about it.

I also added the challenge of NOT upgrading my battery charge at all, which I would recommend if you're really wanting to make the game a bit harder.

AND it has the added bonus of Ancient Link staring into everyone's soul in every single cutscene.

So get out there and run around as a little beastie.

[buboplague]

Speaking of zinru, do you have a good reference for his tattoos? I like to do non-traditional henna that have eye patterns and would love to have his tattoos. (Idk if you play tears of the kingdom but I’ve done Sonia’s tattoos, loved how they looked so much)

I haven't played TOTK yet (still need to play BOTW) but hopefully .. someday... !! For Zinru's tattoos, this is as clear a reference I have from some years ago now, but really anything squiggly and patterned works to fill in the spaces. The main focal points are the eyes, the dots on his fingers, and the little dashes! I don't even follow the details of it myself haha, if you browse my art a lot of it is really just. Whatever squiggles work best. LOL If you do something I'd love to see it!

[karaloza]

Replaying BotW after a solid 9.5 months of TotK is a trip.

First off, I have BotW on the Wii U, so I had to retrain my muscle memory for the controls. I'm still a little surprised when I see a monster and it has, like, a normal horn. I can pick up weapons and just immediately use them without having to improve them. (On the downside...I can't improve them.)

But the main thing is that traveling the world just feels very different between the two games, even though it's the same map. Between the sky island debris, the chasms, and the caves, the landscape itself is fairly different, and more significantly, the fast travel points are almost all in different locations, which means the view when arriving in a given area is different and you have to move differently to get to your actual destination (a Stable or whatever). It changes a lot about how you engage with the geography even though it's technically the same.

I noticed a lot of these differences while playing TotK the first time, but it didn't really sink in because EVERYTHING was new and it all kind of swirled together in the excitement of a new game and story. Now that I am thoroughly used to TotK, going back to BotW feels new all over again. I recommend it if you haven't!

[gwynndolin]

What do you mean "tricks you into thinking it's a good game"? I'm curious because I'm a totk hater (felt more like a fanmade dlc scale mod) but I thought botw was pretty good.

botw obviously has its moments. The Great Plateau was a great introduction to the game, for instance.

But. You do everything that you can do for the rest of the game on that plateau. (Nearly) all of the what the game is going to do is shown to you in the first 5ish hours of gameplay, and those 5 hours are then stretched into a 70ish hour game. Every moment between leaving the Great Plateau and the final fight with Calamity Ganon is riding that high of that first initial experience with the game’s concepts. There is a reason why a lot of people’s most favorite trial in the whole game is when the game throws you onto a deserted island with none of your gear and asks you to rough it again like you were doing 50 hours ago. It’s because the best part of the game was when you were fresh to the experience, often forced to solve the games combat encounters with unique methods; engage with its unique emergent gameplay.

Why even start to bother with that stuff later on though? You actually literally can’t usually. Late game mobs become such sponges to damage that I actively avoided fights because each non trash mob (even the trash mobs would take longer too) would take like 45 seconds to fight. Why try to do a silly funny bomb explosion when the setup takes just as long as the fight only to result in doing a quarter of their health or something. Just press B a bunch of times.

Totk actually did this to me too! Enough time had passed where I was willing to be open to that experience again. And it worked on me! For the first few hours, exploring the Great Sky Island felt like I was playing botw for the first time again. I actually started to think my harsher feelings for botw had all been exacerbated by time or that i had misremembered how it felt to play the game. I was pretty locked in to the whole experience. Then I got on the ground. The false visage of a fresh experience melted away. I was in the same hyrule field as before. I think someone messed with the terrain tool over there. 👉🏻

its like chewing gum. The flavor starts out real strong, and its a fun chew, maybe you haven't had gum in a minute, so this is like, a pretty stimulating experience. But after a while you realize you've had this piece of gum in your mouth for like, the whole day now. And theres no flavor left in it anymore. And you've worked this piece of gum so much now that its like, kinda hard now? But like, looking for a trash can is kind of out of your way so its like, whatever. I'll keep chewing this gum for now. And then like, hours later you're like, wow. I've been chewing this gum for so long now that my jaw kind of hurts. So now you're looking for a trash can. You finally spit the gum out and theres still a lingering flavor of spearmint in your mouth. Not enough to like, re experience that first chew again, but you know. You had a stick of gum. It was alright. My jaw hurts though. I’ll probably have another piece in a few weeks.

[blackautmedia]

Tears of the Kingdom and the Orientalism of the Mummy - Dehydrated Ganon

Plenty have talked about the portrayal of Ganon and the problems with both him and the Gerudo as a whole. I haven't seen as much talk about dehydrated Ganon specifically and wanted to share some of what I'm aware of.

TotK in many ways can be read with the number of plot points it lifts from classic mummy films, which in turn means it also picked up all the racial history and tropes that come with that.

Dehydrated Ganon and Phantom Ganon are mummies. He's explicitly referred to as such several times in the game and the game's opening relies on a number of classic mummy movie tropes in its presentation as introducing a corpse-like Ganon.

Here's an excerpt from the The Mummy On Screen: Orientalism and Monstrosity in Horror Cinema.

Male archaeologists, heroic adventurers and female heroines are all drawn to enigmatic corpses and/or racial ‘Others’, being variously hypnotized, transformed, romanced, coerced and/or transported away from their humdrum lives, sometimes through time to re-experience an ancient past in which they once lived, sometimes through space to Egypt where the monster stalks or seduces them.

Helen in The Mummy (1932) is a woman who succumbs not only to the influence of the Mummy but also to the lure of Egypt itself and its ancient ways that still hold sway.

 If one accepts Wood’s thesis, one can see the Mummy film as having a formidable formula, with the Orient serving as an effective site and its chief monster functioning as a potent medium for the release of the suppressed.

The game is built on Zelda being zipped to the past and her experiences in an ancient, mystical world and seeing the founding of Hyrule while Link is integrated into the resources left behind.

After Link and Zelda were drawn in by the Mummy's call to investigate beneath Hyrule following the rise in illnesses from the gloom.

Zelda is whisked away to ancient Hyrule where she spends time with her very heavily Native coded (which would need an entirely separate post on the tropes associated with that and the way the game uses Anti-Native tropes) Zonai pals.

She's in a rush to return home, but this new space also ends up being a big learning environment for her. She's exposed to this ancient and alluring culture that fascinates her and provides many of the wants and needs she expressed in BoTW.

She's given the supportive parents she's needed--a supportive father figure who explicitly supports her utilizing study to achieve her goals and a loving mother to teach her how to use her powers. She even gets a cool engineering/history auntie who shares a lot in common with her.

All of these things are stolen from Zelda because of the evil mummy.

The game makes great effort to play into the exoticized idea associated with the Zonai, right down to infusing Link and Zelda in their culture with Zelda given a new outfit, home, and lifestyle, and Link gifted with Rauru's power.

The Zonai in TotK are characterized less by their beliefs or the perspective of Mineru or Rauru and more framed in relation to the resources they provide others--the secret stones, the Zonai devices, the exotic, mysterious, ancient powers and knowledge, the zonaite you mine, Rauru's arm, etc.

That leads into another issue with how Tears reinforces the idea of Native extinction in how the Zonai are more characterized for the resources everyone is extracting from them rather than their actual peoples' thoughts and feelings and how that form of erasure harms real Native people outside of the fiction.

There's also the aspect of how the land and resources of these Native people are almost destined to fall into the hands of largely white, "civilized" Hyrule leaders with every other group serving under Hyrule's order geographically and narratively while the Zonai are people we only interact with in memories or as spirits.

The Orient until the second half of the nineteenth century had largely proven a fruitful terrain for colonial conquest and achievement for the British, but from the Indian Mutiny of 1857 towards the end of the century various military setbacks began to point worryingly to a decline in British power…In the aftermath of such events, rather than being perceived as ‘passive’, with ‘no capacity for violence’ (Mercer and Julien 1988: 108), the inhabitants of the Orient became more forbidding, a change in perspective reflected in the literature of the period that simultaneously portrayed anxiety concerning Britain’s own newfound sense of vulnerability.

Richard Marsh’s The Beetle...depicted Egypt as every bit as capable as Transylvania of bringing a primitive threat to the civilized West.

As Marsh’s novel exemplifies, the legacy of the ancient Egyptians had transformed over the course of the nineteenth century from one that bestowed valuable knowledge into one that offered secrets best left unearthed, being increasingly tainted as the years unfolded through its association ‘with the mysterious and supernatural, the questionable and disreputable’.

Mummy films rely very heavily on presenting the "other" as an exotic and almost tempting place for the civilized white protagonists to find and change themselves.

They also acted as a way to depict non-white people to bypass several censorship restrictions in earlier decades, so you often see them framed as romance films with an emphasis on a commentary about that dangerous, tempting allure of the mummy being used as a commentary on interracial relationships and intermingling of the civilized and uncivilized with a white gaze in mind.

Many mummy films also would utilize racial coding to characterize the mummy as hostile, dangerous, tempting or seductive in relation to the white, civilized character, something done with several other movie monsters like Dracula, King Kong, etc.

No matter the Zelda game, the structure ends up being largely the same with Ganon in that Hyrule or wherever is shown to be peaceful until the "evil man of the desert" invaded and defiled their space with his wickedness and disrupting the order of the gods and the status quo.

Dehydrated Ganon specifically is another extension in linking Ganon and his wickedness and evil to his heritage and status as a SWANA-coded character, in a lot of using tropes associated with Black people, etc.

He's not just evil because he's a selfish overlord, he's an evil "other" Middle Easterner invading the pure and peaceful environment the game made the effort to set up, and his constant presence looms in the game in how his corpse-like mummy servant is busy carrying out his will.

The Mummy and Nubian were a particularly suitable pairing considering contemporaneous racial stereotyping...Elizabeth Young years later highlighted others, identifying the black ‘brute’ as a stereotype that ‘carried particular force’ in 1930s cinema as ‘a monstrous beast.

Cultural attitudes towards African Americans manifestly became intertwined with contemporary ones concerning those of North African Egyptian Mummies in this version of the play.

In addition to Zelda being taken to the ancient past, we have the element of Ganon stalking and scheming to his rise to power in how he defiles the sanctity of ancient Hyrule continuing in the pattern of referring to him as the "man of the desert," another means of codifying Ganon as inherently evil by way of his heritage. There's almost constant reference to his home, the desert and anything else associated with othering him.

Ganon has previously used religious iconography in how the Gerudo crest used to very closely resemble the symbol of Islam.

He also uses racial coding associated with antisemitism in how he's a green-skinned, hook nosed magic-wielder.

There's Anti-Black imagery in his muscularity and chains and how he devolves into a mindless, savage brute.

There's all the decades of sentiments toward SWANA people wrapped up in him and the mummy is a continuation of that in how dehydrated Ganon is presented as a stalking, corrupting presence who defiles the sanctity and draws the civilized white protagonists in with his tempting allure. Phantom Ganon is a looming threat who can arise out of nowhere.

I know dehydrated Ganon is the same dude as regular Ganon, but I do think there's an extra element to discuss in how Tears uses decades of old mummy horror and the racial coding that comes with that to further the idea that Ganon is an evil SWANA man who needs to be feared and eradicated.