I *very* strongly recommend The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom (Spoiler-free review)

I got it for free on pc

Would it be recommended to play Breath of the Wild first?

Took me 4 months and 200 hours to beat the game, and first thing I did after was to come here and watch your review. Been thinking about it since prerelease.

I disagree that this game was dense. I had fun playing it but burned out on it and finished it.

“Is it good??…….yes it’s absolutely fucking incredible” and nothing else needed to be said ladies and gentlemen lol . The game fucking SLAPS

SPOILERS!!!

Deeply disappointed in the new zones for this game. Both felt half baked and super repetitive. For how much the sky islands were shown beforehand, they sure put a lot of the same islands everywhere.

Also why the hell is the Great Sky Island literally the only sky island with a different biome? Like cmon Nintendo you couldn’t put a single snow sky island in the SNOW area yet you could put a huge one in the tutorial? Misleading.

This game is boring AF.

I feel like you didn't do enought to explain why the Temples weren't any good, or even explain why the "old school dungeons" are any better.

I think you're overlooking where the depth in both botw and totk's combat lies. It's in the sandbox, not in the number of different attacks at your disposal. totk doesn't have to have a devil-may-cry sized combat moveset for link to be engaging, because there's a basically infinite volume of variety to be found in the types of weapons in your disposal, the types of parts you've fused, the types of zonai technology you might incorporate into your battle, and the terrain itself. Each battle is made to feel unique bc the layout and circumstances of each battle are always different due to all the moving parts of the sandbox.

You say that weapon durability is made doubly worse in this game - I disagree. In breath of the wild, I could sympathise with someone complaining about losing their thunder sword or fire sword, because those weapons were arguably rarer to come by. But in breath of the wild, all you need to do is find the right enemies to defeat, and that results in you being able to farm monster parts to fuse together the thunder sword or fire sword equivalent in totk. If anything, because I have so many monster parts in my inventory, I feel like I'm holding onto a wider variety of weapons, AND, my weapons aren't disheartening to lose at all, because I always knew I could just make a stronger weapon in the near future, when I come across a stronger monster.

Cooking is less annoying for me, because I only ever cook during blood moons to get the guaranteed critical cooks. It results in a fun little rush everytime I realise that a blood moon is starting, where I dash to the nearest cooking pot or just throw out a bunch of zonai pots. The advantage to cooking this way, I feel, is that I'm never thinking about needing to cook during other gameplay segments, and the times that I do cook, are pretty evenly spaced out.

"Given how deep and flexible Tears of the Kingdom's mechanical sandbox is, its combat sandbox feels very one-note and unsophisticated in comparison." Hang on, I've gotta contest this--in BotW and TotK, the combat sandbox IS the mechanical sandbox. What makes it work so well is that all the tools at your disposal in the mechanical sandbox have use and application and dimension within combat as well.

After finishing the game I'm happy with it overall. However it's too bad weapon durability rears it's ugly head again!

Weapon durability I understand people who favor, they like using the reason that it forces you to use different weapons and combinations. That is true, but only at the start of the game.

As you progress in the game and you understand which weapons work which weapons are the strongest, then the concept behind weapon durability becomes a moot point. Why? Because you can repair it by visiting octoroks and wait for a blood moon for them to respawn. It becomes a wash and repeat process and repetitive. Which is a boring and time wasting process.

The game allows you to visit people in villages that can build you a new color scheme glider or make a travel medallion to instantly travel to locations easily. So why not have a blacksmith at villages to repair weapons. The whole system seems contradictory to other aspects of the game. There are people in the game that can repair entire towers to make them operational in order to be able to unlock portions of the map, but there are no blacksmiths to fix weapons.

The way the weapon durability is in the game seems like a forced concept in order to waste people's time to grind items and to grind octoroks to repair. These added steps seem to be there for purposes to waste a players time.

If the argument is to make the game more challenging to use your creativity to combined weapons and force you to use other weapons that only works at the start of the game. It doesn't work mid to late game. If the argument is to make the player feel like they have to survive and use their surroundings to come up with ways to make weapons than why are there travel medallions, towers for fast travel and a glider? Because Nintendo knew that would be too tedious to travel manually everywhere and to have the player constantly make a new glider after a limited amount of use would also be boring.

Keep weapon durability but remove the time wasting process. This can easily be solved by adding blacksmiths in the game that can fix your weapons using materials you find in the wild or for certain amount of fees depending on the weapon.

In my 40 years of gaming I can honestly say that TOTK is probably one of, if not the best game ever made.
The end.

Absolutely love the creativity with the huge mysterious world of zelda, such an adventure. I sure it'll go down as one of the best games ever made, at least by my opinion. ❤❤❤

definitely lives up to the name of shill up

I don’t think you really thought about new ways to approach combat. There are so many things you can do in tiers of the kingdom in a combat situation rather than just using taking turns swinging your sword. Also I don’t know how you think the durability situation hasn’t gotten better.

"Starting with the least impactful ability, Recall"

Are you sure about that.mp3

I absolutely love your perfect use of profanity. "And I said, fuck that" "however the fuck you please" its poetic good sir. And makes me smile every time.

Just gonna say it, this is one of the best games i've ever played

I miss how's that would a used to be don't like the new formula at all 😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭

i bought yesterday a switch and Zelda Tears and i love it. Next month i buy Breath of the Wild and 3-4 other games i whant for the switch

GOTY

they really take elden ring world concept

I love the weapon fusing tbh

I’ve spent 150+ hours in this game, and I couldn’t be happier.

Before i watch this i ll ask this . Any mentions of the clunky controlls? The chasing around the sages in battle during constant fps drops to enable their skills, leading to an unregistered button promt and unfair damage taken? Or the broken plot that contradicts botw? Or the fact that links need like 5 min to get up after rolling like a barrel if a mosquito looks at him? Or of the poor balancing (the mobs do more dmg than the bosses)?
I ll bet 1000 dollars that the answer is no😅. I ll know after i see the vid
P.s saw the vid, some of those issues were indeed mentioned, so i would say i lost half the bet and won the other half😆

Watching this review again after putting over 100 hours into Totk reinforces my belief that you understand video games better than any games journalist on the planet. It makes me sad because your FF16 review is not positive. I hope your issues with 16 do not resonate as strongly with me. I want FF to have a big win. The series deserves it.

Imagine if we could do this with an open world Pokemon game.

It is amazing. Ever since I was a little kid playing "The legend of Zelda: A link to the past" (still one of my favorite games of all time), the Zelda franchise has consistently for decades produced some of the best games in every single generation.

Hmm what kind of games are you playing that have 16Gb save files???

This game is a fucking masterpiece. Well done, Nintendo. I thought BoTW was highly overrated, but this, this is amazing. GOTY for me.

The depths are the worst piece of zelda content ever created. Takes all the fun out of exploration and every time I have to go there for story beats I wanna die.

The best review I've seen of the game.

Man, just a couple of mods and I would really love this game. It's just sad that consoles don't have this option.

Fuse actually improves weapon durability in a sense that each enemy camp has a valuable loot aka their Horns that you can use to make a powerful weapon...

In BotW you can clear an entire camp broke your Savage Lynel Sword or Royal Broadsword which are the strongest in the game and be rewarded with faaaar weaker weapons, which gives the impression that most of the fight should be avoided if the weapons enemy has is weak...

In TotK tho they made sure that most camp have 1 sort of a powerful mob either a Black or Silver version in mid-late game or Blue at the start of the game that keeps the Weapon economy balanced granted you are smart with your attacks and is hitting the enemy rather than the ground... This ensures that the game will mostly refill you with weapons that are competent and doesn't feel like trash.

Also arrow fusion makes the bow even more powerful which can help in managing your weapon durability and can even make the weakest bow useful as a weapon to fuse elemental arrows from... Or you can just throw those elemental items so you don't need to consume any Durability from you arsenal...

Also last thing FUSE YOUR STRONG MONSTER PARTS, STOP HOARDING!!! Even the guy in this review are using 6-10 damage weapons in Hebra region when in fact you can easily find 15-30 damage weapons in the sorrounding of Lookout landing... I don't know why alot of people have this obssession in hoarding stuff "waiting for the right opportunity" to come to use them...

Technological marvel indeed Austin 😊

great review as always, but it's interesting to hear someone describe the combat as if they had the exact opposite experience as i did. Durability feels like a non issue to me due to how easy it is to get strong weapons, enemies did not feel unusually strong, the combat system feels massive and endlessly creative. I dunno.

The first play thru of BOTW is the same tons of puzzles in the world and get side tracked constantly doing other things exploring and having fun. The games are totally different but they do the same thing in that regard as well as multiple ways to do one task.

Barely played breath of the wild for more than a few hours, on my back log, didn't grab me beyond the first few hours of the novelty factor of it being open world. I'll wait while this on sale... Oh wait, OK I'll wait another 7 years or so. Give my chance to plow through, by my calculations... my 10+ year back log anyway

I don't have an issue with fuse and weapon durability. For one just like in BOTW you can simply farm Lynels for what you need. Not to mention you can ...get good weapons for fusing through other means. The more you play the game too the more you just keep figuring out, recall for instance has a ton more uses than "undo". After 200+ hours I'm certain I barely scratched the surface. Which is just crazy.

Amazing review, totally nails the strengths of this game with a balanced appreciation of certain weaknesses. I’m loving the game, so many mechanics it’s easy to forget or miss some, I still need to remind myself to use ascend- if I’m stuck the answer is usually ascend. This showed me I’d missed some interactions and options I’d never even considered.

There is a recipe book though but it’s hidden in the menu - select the ingredient, if you’ve used it before a select recipe option will be beneath the hold option. Select the recipe card and it auto holds all the ingredients- really easy to overlook, if an npc gives you a meal it’s added to the cards which helps as well. In case that’s helpful to anyone.

Really enjoy your reviews, will be waiting for your FF16 video, on the fence with that one, fingers crossed it’s as good as it looks.

They really need to come out with a new system because the switch is just terrible. I played through the beginning and it just runs so bad. It's really hard to go from 144fps to below 30 a lot of times. Like going from 5 star food to prison slop.

Dejavu...

Zelda totk, when you go all out on meaningless quantity and invest barely anything in quality. 97% of totk content is the player derping around on the worldmap so you better like it. No one wants fleshed out dungeons. They want to do 152 shrines! 400 caves! 1100 krogs! Temples are small, heartless, empty and done in 5 minutes? Nice!
totk has its moments but overall its subpar. below average. Compared to classics like a link to the past totk is trash

Man I can't believe they followed up the greatest game of all time with the greatest game of all time.

Its just the first game but somehow so much worse, two very overrated games

Zelda Tears of the Kingdom is amazing, having so much fun playing it, super addictive, the graphics are beautiful and colorful, the sky area, underground, surface of Hyrule, the map is massive and a joy exploring it for hours, so much fun and stuff to do, absolute masterpiece 👏👏👏👏

You can fix durability by dropping weapons to a rock octorock, which makes them at max durability again