#salt of the kingdom

[blue-likethebird]

Reusing the memory system from botw for the tears of the dragon storyline in totk was such a terrible decision on so many different levels that it’s honestly kind of impressive.

While the botw memory system had flaws of its own, there was one small but significant thing that worked in its favour: botw’s memories were largely separate from the main plot in the past, and have absolutely no bearing on the story being told in the present. Aside from a few specific instances (ie the calamity striking, the ceremony, Link and Zelda becoming closer) the memories are all self-contained moments that emphasize character development over driving the story. Because there’s no major narrative throughline between them, it gives players more freedom to discover in any order regardless of how much they’ve progressed through the main quest without running the risk of stumbling across a memory that ruins something else later on in the game.

(This got long so the rest of my analysis is going under the cut.)

The biggest change between the memories from botw and the dragon’s tears from totk is definitely what kind of information these cutscenes relay to you as the player. Botw’s memories are primarily snapshots of small interpersonal moments that hold very little significance to the greater narrative taking place in the past. Totk’s memories are the greater narrative. With only one major exception -that I’ll touch on in a sec-, every cutscene in the dragon’s tears shows a crucial moment of story development with no time left to explore the characters driving that story forwards. There’s no organic moment revealing, say, a quirk of Rauru’s that Mineru finds annoying, or Sonia’s sense of humour, or any of our literal Main Villain Ganondorf’s motivations for going to war with Hyrule. If there’s any moments of character focus they only happen in ways that advance the plot (meaning the only real character focus is on the characters totk wants the entire universe to orbit around, namely Rauru and Zelda), and as such it’s harder to bring myself to care about what happens to anyone.

To illustrate the point I’m trying to make here, compare the memories of the champions Link regains during the divine beast quests to the conversations with the ancient sages at the end of each temple. The memories make passing mentions of the ongoing preparations for the calamity, but the real purpose of those scenes is to showcase who the champions were as people before their deaths and give us a reason to mourn them, even though we know at the start of our journey that they’re all long gone. In contrast, the conversations with the ancient sages are all about the events of the imprisoning war and their promise to Zelda that their descendants will come to Link’s aid in the future, very obviously copy pasted for each of the five times that cutscene is brought up (which is a particularly egregious moment of bad quest design but that’s a rant for another time) in such a way that none of the 5 incarnations of that cutscene reveal anything new about the ancient sages as characters, to the point where none of them even show their faces. I care about Daruk because the game shows me that he cares deeply about the wellbeing of his fellow champions and brings out the best in others. So why should I care about the nameless, faceless sage of water? What’s there to move me about their struggles if my only interactions with the sages are a series of exposition dumps? If the game can’t give me a reason to sincerely care about its main characters, the whole rest of the story is meaningless.

(As an aside, I get the feeling someone on the dev team caught on to the issue I’m describing here, because the tea party memory sticks out like a sore thumb from the rest of the dragon tear cutscenes. It’s such a jarring change of pace to have the otherwise plot-heavy dragon’s tears come screeching to a halt for a scene where Sonia sits down with Zelda to have a cute little tea party and talk about absolutely nothing of significance that the whole thing almost seems like it was hastily tacked on to the story later. Given that the next (chronological) memory sees Sonia fall victim to an unceremonious death by chiropractor, it feels like someone realized that Sonia really doesn’t do or say much in the scenes before she dies and threw together the tea party scene so players would have at least one moment to look back on fondly when she’s fridged. But I digress)

The story told in the dragon’s tears is a highly linear one. But the open-ended nature of botw’s memory system remains, meaning that these tears can be found and viewed in any order. At first this doesn’t seem so bad, since the first two tears you’re likely to find if you follow the game’s intended path are also the chronological first and second of the memories you can discover through these geoglyph tears. But after those first two, the game kinda gives up on guiding you towards these tears in a way that flows well with the story they wrote: the closest tear geographically to the two the game initially guides you towards correlates to one of the penultimate scenes of that entire storyline, while the next scene chronologically is found almost halfway across the map. As such, it’s all but guaranteed that you’ll spoil yourself in some way without using either a guide or the (somewhat unintuitive and never fully explained by the game) little map in the forgotten temple. Finding memories in order didn’t matter so much in botw because the scenes you could find still worked well as standalone scenes before you discovered every memory and pieced together the full picture, and the game is never trying to surprise me about the characters’ fates at the end of this storyline: hell the first memory you’re guided to shows the calamity striking. But in contrast, viewing a dragon’s tear at the wrong time can completely ruin the story they’re trying to tell in those cutscenes. During my playthrough, for example, the first tear I found after the game stopped guiding me to them showed Ganondorf removing Sonia’s stone from her dead body. At this point I had known Sonia existed for all of like an hour, so every subsequent appearance she made was ruined for me by the fact that I already knew she was nothing but cannon fodder to be killed off for the sake of another character’s pain (Rauru and Zelda a-fucking-gain). I expected to be pissed that it was so easy to spoil myself, or maybe sad in passing that a character with her potential was so underutilized, but instead I just felt… tired. I wasn’t even halfway to the first settlement and already I was completely numb to the story the game was trying to tell.

But the worst was yet to come. And oh boy was it ever a low point for storytelling in the Zelda series. Remember how I said up above that the memories in botw had no connection to the story in the present? Let’s just say the same cannot be said for the dragon’s tears.

It’s May 2023. I’ve just finished the sage of wind questline. I still have hope that the story the game is trying to tell will be good. Deciding that I’ll go to Goron city next, I head towards the Thyplo skyview tower to expand my map, catch a glimpse of a nearby geoglyph from the air, and glide over to check it out. This geoglyph shows me a memory that not only recaps the entire dragon tear storyline, but also ends on a bit of foreshadowing about Zelda’s fate that’s about as subtle as a brick to the fucking face. By exploring -the thing the game claims it prioritized above all else in the design of its world and quests- I’d once again been hit with spoilers for a major story detail.

My main objective in this game is to find Zelda. It’s the only driving factor behind my journey towards all these different regions. The current big mystery I’m supposed to solve is why Zelda’s causing so much hell for the people of Hyrule. I now knew exactly where she was and what the deal with her appearances in other parts of Hyrule was, and I’d found it completely by accident by doing something the game says over and over again that it wants me to do. Unlike with Sonia’s death, this time I was a mess of emotions. I was pissed the fuck off that this open-world game had punished me twice already for trying to explore. More than that, I was disappointed that a game I had been so excited to play, from a series I had so many fond memories of, had let me down like this. With every subsequent quest where the sages and I chased a Zelda I knew was fake to our next objective, and every NPC wondering where she was that I couldn’t tell the truth to, that disappointment grew. The entire rest of the main story was ruined for me before I had progressed past 1/4th of the regional quests and a third of the dragon’s tears. There was no more sense of anticipation or mystery. I finished the rest of the game with a bitter taste in my mouth and haven’t touched it again since.

Do I think this story could have been good? Honestly, I don’t know, and by now I don’t really care either (that’s a lie. I care so so much and that’s probably why I hate totk as much as I do). But it’s all irrelevant, because like Cinderella’s stepsister cutting off her own heel so she can cram her foot into a glass slipper that’s never going to fit, totk is sabotaged by the devs’ insistence that everything fit itself into a world they custom-made for botw. This isn’t a new formula that the series is following, it’s Nintendo slapping a new coat of paint on an existing skeleton, and I’m not optimistic to see what this particular approach has in store for the Zelda series. Especially not at the price they’re charging for it.

[melkychi]

Sea salt family

[djangotheasteri]

love this team from kh, they are the best.

[separatethingy]

Mooooore bloopers!

I figured I'd do the next trio on the list. Though I guess for now, it's just the duo.

I feel like these two would mess with each other constantly. Just complete menaces.

[nebulousbren]

The whole set!

Btw since more than a few have said they would get these as tattoos, let me just say: you absolutely have my permission 👍🏻

[brittle-doughie]

Thinking about the acient Y/N cookie

Imagine a Y/N cookie who was part of the first 5 cookies who were baked But this Y/N was the only one who didn't get corrupted by their powers.

Final Days (The Five Beasts)

Granted power by your Creator and tasked to bring your corrupted friends back here wasn’t the hard part…

The hard part was watching them get imprisoned, hearing their pained protests and anguish. It was hard bringing them all to one place and even harder to not fall to each of their temptations..

Mystic Flour didn’t understand why you felt the need to protect such fragile cookies, cookies that can disintegrate into nothing with just a motion of her hand. Why bother spending a fraction of your power for these helpless little things…

Silent Salt couldn’t bring themself to raise their sword towards you, someone they called a friend even after having fallen to darkness. They just didn’t get it, why you cared for these weak pieces of dough….

Eternal Sugar was the most in denial above the rest. She didn’t understand why this was happening, you had to be under someone’s control to do this to her! She thought you loved her! She’ll cry out to you as the chains enveloped her prison, to please look at her, she needs to see your face, your eyes! She weakly cries as you leave her prison, at least tell her that…you…you….

You stood up for those little cookies against him?! Red Spice is trying to rack his brain for any kind of rationalization to your choice and can’t seem to find any! He never thought the day to raise his weapon against you would be now of all times, didn’t do him any good if he’s now stuck here!

The staredown before you and Shadow Milk as his prison traps him in, his hands struggling to keep the bars apart. This was the route you chose?! Why?! It could’ve been you and him, playing the weak cookies beneath you like fiddles, having them dance to your tune! You put those frail pieces of dough before HIM?!

And yet….none of them could bring themselves to hate you for this.

They couldn’t….

———————————————————————

You…don’t really hold onto your power nowadays..less you might end up becoming just like them. It pains you to be dishonest about your capabilities, but..you try to chalk it up as being for the best. Especially in current day.

“Y/N Cookie! There you are! I’ve been looking all over for you, the time of the expedition is today! Are you ready to join us?”

You chuckle to him as you finish up prepping your gear, stating that you’ll be with him and the others in a minute!

You wished you never had to go back to Beast Yeast again, but…if it meant possibly finding..her…then so be it!

[endlessskymaster]

The latest chapter of KH3 manga was released (in JP not in English yet) Sea Salt Trio reunion.

[catmewniverse]

I believe fully in girl dad Isa

[raezingart]

two trios done, one left to go.

I really love the sea salt trio you guys.

[anime-grimmy-art]

"Got it memorized?"

Yeah, I havent gotten this dude outta my head the last 15 years.

[luxmoogle]

The ice cream colours his lips blue

[blue-likethebird]

The explanation for why totk’s story is so Not Great and how disconnected from its predecessor it feels being that the devs didn’t want to alienate new players who didn’t know anything about botw’s story just falls apart the more I think about it. Nothing from this stupid half a plot works unless the player is familiar with specific details from the better games that came before it.

The believability of Link and Zelda’s connection to each other hinges on you knowing about the nuance of their relationship in botw. The ancient sages fighting with the champions’ arms and divine beast helms will only be impactful to botw/aoc players because totk doesn’t bother to explain the significance of that callback at all. Fi’s cameo is meaningless unless you either got every memory in botw or finished the master trial dlc (and know about her from skyward sword). You’ll only get the full context of Teba being sidelined in favour of a 12-year old if you played a specific chapter of Age of Calamity’s second DLC. Like sorry but I think Nintendo just made a bad story tbh

[silly-vanilla]

Continuing to add new faces to the Swap. Fair Salt looks like they're ready to destroy a couple friendly kingdoms in the form of the Silent Enchanter….. I don't fully like their design anyway, might change something in the future. Fair Salt doesn't have a kingdom of their own, so they live with their old friend Light Milk Cookie as a knight, who teases them in every way possible.

[kafeicreme]

Had a lot of fun with the colors ! Wanted to draw Xion happy because my girl deserves it

[separatethingy]

I have to go back to work 😔

Have this Peep and the Big Wide World lookin doodle

[nebulousbren]

It's done! Everyone's having a good time playing games and nothing will ever be wrong :D

For anyone wondering where the Disney dudes are, Mickey and Donald are on a double date with Minnie and Daisy at Scrooge's bistro, while Goofy is catching a movie.