Alright so my final opinion of this game after beating it:
This game is superior to Breath of the Wild in every single way, and yes, that was the best final boss in Zelda. I actually predicted exactly what the final boss would be believe it or not, as soon as I found out what happened to Zelda and that Ganondorf also had a sacred stone…I’ll leave it at that.
So yeah, superior to BOTW in every single way. That said, in the two weeks since I have beaten this game, I feel as though I’ve basically forgotten that it even exists. I’ve just gone straight back to Elden Ring and still look back more fondly on Majora than any other Zelda. Idk. This new direction for Zelda just may not be for me. Tears is incredible but I just don’t think Zelda is reaching the heights that it used to reach.
This game is superior to Breath of the Wild in every single way, and yes, that was the best final boss in Zelda. I actually predicted exactly what the final boss would be believe it or not, as soon as I found out what happened to Zelda and that Ganondorf also had a sacred stone…I’ll leave it at that.
So yeah, superior to BOTW in every single way. That said, in the two weeks since I have beaten this game, I feel as though I’ve basically forgotten that it even exists. I’ve just gone straight back to Elden Ring and still look back more fondly on Majora than any other Zelda. Idk. This new direction for Zelda just may not be for me. Tears is incredible but I just don’t think Zelda is reaching the heights that it used to reach.
Hey guys, have any of you heard of this Indigo OOT romhack?
This is something that has been catching my eye more and more lately. I am watching bits of videos here and there, and this actually looks really solid. It even has Roc's feather, which is pretty damn cool. Supposedly, when complete, it will have its own custom bosses and basically be a standalone fan-made title.
Right now, from what I can gather, it is nearing completion but not quite there yet. I think I definately want to play this one, but will try to wait for it to be completed first.
This is something that has been catching my eye more and more lately. I am watching bits of videos here and there, and this actually looks really solid. It even has Roc's feather, which is pretty damn cool. Supposedly, when complete, it will have its own custom bosses and basically be a standalone fan-made title.
Right now, from what I can gather, it is nearing completion but not quite there yet. I think I definately want to play this one, but will try to wait for it to be completed first.
It's been a while since I last wrote in this thread but before I really wanted to give my input about TotK (and the dungeons), I had to play the game a lot more. Here's my insight about what I think about the whole direction of the new Zelda games so far, especially when it comes to dungeons.
First of all, Aonuma confirmed that they're not doing a large DLC part of Zelda TotK. Imo it's definitely good since they now can move on from the entire BotW/AoC/TotK stuff.
They also confirmed that they're gonna keep the open air formular when it comes to future Zelda games.
I hope they are not gonna be BotW copies. Despite TotK changing so much stuff, it still felt very similar to BotW in which some lesser changes would make the comparison more dangerous. And honestly, BotW looks like a demo version of TotK and imo this is definitely not good. MM didn't make OoT look like an inferior demo version. Neither did Link's Awakening with A Link to the Past. If BotW looks that bad in some comparisons to TotK, there's definitely going something very wrong. Nintendo grew tired of the repetitive traditional Zelda formular but I hope they won't make the new concept/formular as repetitive as well. And honestly, at least older Zelda still had their dungeons as a mega + argument, with the new formular, things can get stacked much more because aside of overworld exploration, freedom and creativity of the gameplay, there's not much which the new formular can really offer to.
Now, this post is gonna be full of rant in many parts, so on those people who don't agree with this at all, y'all can simply ignore the rest of this post. Of those who at least partially agree with my takes, I'll show why I rant so much about these things:
I still hate how they changed the dungeon formular. I've played good hours in TotK and yes, it is a very funny Zelda game and it is easily a 8/10, in contrast to BotW which is now a 6/10 imo, but it is clear that dungeons have a very small priority in the new Zelda formular. I'm baffled. They rather develop 152 fucking shrines, some were even better designed than the actual dungeons lmao, instead of keeping the numbers rather small whilst working on 6 - 7 extra large dungeons. Elden Ring demonstrated it perfectly. Even the starting main dungeon, Stormveil Castle, unironically was larger than the largest dungeon in TotK. That's sad man. They gave zero fucks to the dungeons and I'm sure they did it so the fans can shut up finally - that's my impression of how they designed these 6 dungeons. At least in BotW, they had the excuse that they had to cut lots of content and the fact of them developing such a large open-world Zelda being extremely time-consuming, considering the fact that they spent years on the game engine. But TotK? There's no excuses. They had approximately 6 years of development. They managed to triple the map's size. And they also created 152 (!) shrines - far more than even BotW - so that was their conclusion? So yeah, dungeons weren't just their priority. As disappointing as it is, I fully expect future Zelda games to have similar structure. Nope: I'm expecting how future Zelda games might even have less focus on Zelda dungeons. I'll explain why:
Sure, TotK had themed dungeons again but the execution of 4 to 6 dungeons is just extremely terrible. Before I speak about the negative things in general, I'll explain what I liked or not about these dungeons. I'll elaborate via ranking:
6th: Water Temple. It is the saddest, most plainness, lazy designed dungeon I've ever seen in a Zelda game. It only has one floor (I don't even count the basement since it contains only one small room) which is based on small sky islands. You can also easily reach them, there is no navigation whatsoever and there's only around 5 entire puzzles which can be solved in few minutes. Forget fighting through complex rooms, everything is completely open and that's the main issue about this dungeon. It has the gravity + water theme but I saw little of that shit. The most ironic thing is that the way to the Water Temple would be a much better part of the dungeon if it was actually included into the entire dungeon. Why creating puzzles of floating bubbles, rivers which you can swim when it barely appears in the actual dungeon? How cool would it be if the dungeon contained of large multi-layered floating buildings which you have to traverse in order to activate the 4 - 5 terminals? It would give this theme a meaning at least.
No dungeon keys, no closed doors, no inner rooms, it was pure boring. Vah Ruta is unironically better than the Water Temple. And BotW has 4 identical boring dungeons. That's how bad it is.
5th: Hyrule Castle. Well, it is better than the Water Temple - which isn't surprising at all - but it is basically a far weaker version than the BotW one and whilst I expected some changes in the dungeon layout, nothing was different about this dungeon. I still enjoyed it but it was just some cat chasing mouse game in which you had 4 checkpoints in which you saw Zelda who vanished and spammed monsters on you. That was all. But I'd say Hyrule Castle was more like the Forsaken Fortress in Wind Waker, that's why I don't really mind that it's different to the other dungeons.
4th: Construct Factory. Well, well, well - who was hyped and anticipated seeing the Spirit Temple and the actual dungeon is... the Construct Factory which doesn't even have a map. Navigation = 0. But unlike the Water Temple, I actually enjoyed the puzzles and it was fun building up Mineru's robot. The issue is... I thought this was just some questline again before you reach the actual dungeon, being the Spirit Temple. So when I was doing this quest I always thought "Man, I can't wait to see the actual dungeon. When it is the turn?" and when I reached the Spirit Temple I thought "Finally! We're moving on to the actual Spirit Temple! I'm expecting that the theme will be pure darkness in which you can light the rooms with Brightbloom Seeds whilst navigating with Mineru's robot. I hope it'll be a rather large dungeon!" but it was only used as a boss room.
Nah man, I'm still ranting whilst writing this post. They really just baited all diehard OoT fans by bringing up the "Spirit Temple" name only to fuck it up like that.
Now, why did they decide to do a complete 180° on that? It is not an understatement to claim this dungeon was fully intented to use the essence of BotW/TotK identity: pure freedom of exploration. You had an open field of several buildings with an objection and they were basically your terminal spots. Hence it fully used the open-air formular to its fullest. I said above how Nintendo might even have less focus on Zelda dungeons - this dungeon is the reason why I think so. It is highly likely that they'll keep this particular dungeon formular of Construct Factory and will do future dungeons just like that. Tbh, I don't like that one bit. The feeling of feeling lost in a rather large dungeon without a dungeon map. Navigating through this massive labyrinth, finding secret paths - this might no longer happen.
Hence I don't really count this as a traditional dungeon as well. Again, even Divine Beasts had more sense of tradition than that. Everyone can base their opinion whatever they like about but as I said, it wouldn't wonder me if those dungeons will be common from now on.
3th: Wind Temple. How ironic that the starting dungeon is better than half of the other dungeons, especially the last one. Yes, it only has 1 floor and 2 basements but the puzzles were fun, the dungeon layout was decent, dungeon design was really great and it greatly reminded me of the Sandship in Skyward Sword. And the boss, oh, especially the boss was 100/10 of this entire dungeon. But at the end, aside of the boss, there wasn't anything extraordinary about this dungeon. It was a decent first dungeon, not the most terrible but not the greatest. Imo TP's Forest Temple was way better.
2th: Fire Temple. Finally a themed dungeon which actually had the proper length of a traditional dungeon. From now, these two dungeons have the most connection to traditional dungeons and imo they are not weaker than a majority of them. With 5 floors, good dungeon layout, buildings and rooms and the mining cart puzzles overall connected very well to the theme of this dungeon. I needed a whole hour and some more to finish this dungeon and I finally felt like it was something more than just "Throw some random rooms filed with few puzzles and call it a day". It had proper navigation, I often had to look at the dungeon map to understand the layout, how all tracks are connected to each other and so on. The Zonai devices were also effectively used for lava puzzles.
This dungeon beats all Divine Beasts neg diff. I was really glad they kept it so close to traditional dungeons like that.
1th: Lightning Temple. This dungeon also beats several other traditional dungeons. The whole dungeon felt like Indiana Jones and they finally added light puzzles in which you had to use the mirror (shield) again. And there was also more enemy variety with the gibdos. Puzzles were challenging and funny. Dungeon layout complex and large, it had around 8 floors iirc and the dungeon boss was also very cool. I liked how you fought Queen Gibdo twice; it already started before the actual dungeon.
This dungeon was the closest to traditional dungeons. They did nothing wrong with it which was bound to the game's limitations.
Now that's it for my ranking.
I left out the following issues because I want to address them outside the ranking because they are rather a general issues of the dungeons and not necessarily a negative point of an individual dungeon: The terminals. No keys. No struggle to find navigation via finding the dungeon map. No compass.
The most problematic one are the terminals.
It is not the problem that the terminals exist - they are clearly meant to replace the master key and I actually like the idea of finding 4 - 5 pieces of the "master key". It is also way better than finding one single master key in a chest. But the execution is a major issue since BotW.
In BotW, we had the excuse that Divine Beasts just function differently to traditional dungeons and this was somewhat alright. But in TotK? We had themed dungeons and the whole focus was laid on finding 4 - 5 terminal spots when you immediately enter the dungeon, aside of Lightning Temple but I'll explain later on. I don't like how the entirety of almost all dungeons are purely centered around those terminals. At least in BotW you had to activate the first (!) terminal to get the dungeon map but in TotK, it already started. They immediately slap you with "You have to activate 4 - 5 terminals! Go and find them!" and they are even located into your fucking map.
Where's the surprise? Where's the reason of logic to find them in the first place? I cannot believe that they performed this terrible design decision and didn't even change it. No, they did it even worse. You have 4 dungeons were the majority of puzzles are only centered around those terminals. I'm not kidding. In the Water Temple, you have the 1st floor with the 4 sky islands and 3 of those terminals are located there. So you enter the dungeon -> basic sage speech about finding the terminals -> the dungeon begins and you already got the objection of finding those terminals -> you "navigate" through the dungeon -> you immediately have to solve the puzzles -> congratulation, you have solved 3-4 puzzles and you activated 3 terminals as well. Oh, there's one left? Then go to the basement and see what you have to do there. Oh, there is only one room? Okay, do that puzzle - oh, you activated the terminal as well? Well then, now go to the boss room, activate the "boss door" and fight the boss.
I'm not kidding again, this was the entire narrative of 3 dungeons in TotK!!!!!! Construct Factory had 12 puzzles with 4 mechanical body parts which also work like terminals. Why 12 puzzles? Each building has two sections which contains one puzzle: 2. When you got that mechanical body, you have to transport this onto the central part of the dungeon which is another puzzle. So 3 puzzles for each building and there are only 4 buildings. Hyrule Castle isn't technically a dungeon like the others but we gotta stay consistent.
How much of a joke is it that the Fire Temple and the Lightning Temple did way more than that? They actually feel like whole dungeons and the puzzles are not completely centered around fucking terminals! You have the mining carts and the tracks in the Fire Temple. You often had to navigate through the dungeon to orientate yourself properly. You often had to use Zonai devices. Sure, even this dungeon basically slaps you with "Activate the terminals! Go and find them!" straight at the start of the Fire Temple but the implemention is at least way better than the other ones.
This is the part when the Lightning Temple did a complete "F*ck you!" on all those dungeons when it included a whole section in which you had to navigate throughout the corridors and rooms before you reached the room to activate the first terminal. And in this entire section, you had to solve some Indiana Jones puzzles whilst fighting gibdos. Then it was basically like the Fire Temple but even better performed.
But that's the thing: The Lightning Temple actually included a seperate section in which the terminals are not even included. They are meant to be the master key(s), so why are they already making up 80% of the entire dungeon? The search of the master key should only appear near the middle or end of the dungeon, otherwise you cannot properly do puzzles which focuses on proper exploration and navigation throughout the dungeon. And almost all of TotK dungeons perfectly demonstrate it.
I mentioned the absolute lack of dungeon keys. Well, the question is, why no dungeon keys? Some backtracking through the dungeon wouldn't hurt and dungeon keys are often use to make progression throughout the dungeon more stacking, as it should be. The objection should be to explore the layout of the dungeon, especially looking at chests, to make sure you find the proper item to open a locked door in order to progress further. Sure, there were some locked doors in those dungeons but the thing is, they were heavily tied to puzzles in the very same room and it didn't require a small key to open these. How often did it happen in older Zelda games that you suddenly saw a locked door which prevented your progression? So there was no way to look up at the small key to open the locked door - hence backtracking through the dungeon. Again, this isn't even bad. Dungeons are meant to be dungeons after all.
The worst thing is that small keys do appear in some shrines and oh wonders, they have the same objection like older Zelda games. Shrines can be solved very individually right? Yet it didn't damage this feeling of exploration by using dungeon keys. It made progression more difficult and you actually had to look out very carefully at certain chests to find the dungeon key.
Isn't it extremely ironic how traditional dungeon items are used in non-traditional Zelda mini-dungeons instead of the actual dungeons? But okay, I guess there wouldn't be much of sense implementing dungeon keys in 5 very small sky islands called "Water Temple". Heck, a majority of Sky Islands were significantly larger than the Water Temple. How sad is that?
I already explained very well about dungeon traversing above but I still have some stuff to be explained. It doesn't make sense to make the walls of dungeons completely climbable, it completely defeats the purpose of those dungeons, especially when it is centered around puzzles. I highly praised the Fire Temple - but only if you exactly follow the narrative of those puzzles as intended. You sure can do the mining cart stuff but you can also just skip this part since you can easily climb the walls on those buildings. And on the Lightning Temple you can use Ascend to skip some floors as well. There should be made some restrictions, it is necessary. Shrines also have those restrictions. You cannot just climb your way through puzzles when it is convenient. Solving puzzles differently actually requires much harder struggle. But well, at least there are no restrictions on Ascend but mostly, shrines are so build that there's no real use cheating your way through Ascend, unlike the dungeons.
One last thing: BotW/TotK dungeons are a very small priority in new Zelda formular and unfortunately, this is very evident. I mean, they got lots of critics of too many shrines and them being similar. Nintendo gave zero fucks and even increased the shrine numbers on +32.
A majority of them having the same issues. Sure, some shrines were really cool and even better than the best BotW shrines but honestly, you can easily cut 80 other shrines and they would still shine a lot, maybe even far better. Hell, some shrines even have very similar puzzles of the actual dungeons. But why "very similar" instead of "same puzzles"? Because those shrines did those puzzles way better than the main dungeons. 
I can only include Elden Ring again. This game has around 50 mini dungeons or so but they were all fun and they obviously didn't take the spotlight of the actual main dungeons which were still very large and funny. In contrast to Elden Ring, we have TotK doing the absolute opposite. It's such a joke. We clearly have 3 unfinished, boring and terrible "dungeons" with very lazy design while they were busy developing 32 more shrines. A lot of content would be saved if they simply used the content of those shrines into the actual dungeons...
In conclusion: They didn't only change the dungeon formular but also the priority of those dungeons. Their new dungeon formular are the shrines. That's what they used as immediate marketing in the very first trailers of BotW and TotK? We saw shrines instead of actual dungeons. Guess why? It's because they are the new dungeons and Nintendo wants to put the narrative and focus entirely on those new dungeons, worth of hundreds. Those 4 or 6 are just "extra dungeons" to shut up those traditional fans. They nearly have no priority as the shrines. That's why Nintendo barely promoted themed dungeons in TotK and that's why Nintendo confirmed themed dungeons only shortly before the release of the game. Because that's all we're gonna get.
Maybe future Zelda dungeons might have higher priority or not but again, I highly doubt we're gonna get a large amount of good dungeons again. At best we're gonna get 1 - 2 good dungeons if it even stays at that lmao.
@Elder Lee Hung @EmperorKinyagi @Buusatan94 @Playa4321 @Shimotsuki Ghostly @Cross_Marian @TheKnightOfTheSea
First of all, Aonuma confirmed that they're not doing a large DLC part of Zelda TotK. Imo it's definitely good since they now can move on from the entire BotW/AoC/TotK stuff.
They also confirmed that they're gonna keep the open air formular when it comes to future Zelda games.
I hope they are not gonna be BotW copies. Despite TotK changing so much stuff, it still felt very similar to BotW in which some lesser changes would make the comparison more dangerous. And honestly, BotW looks like a demo version of TotK and imo this is definitely not good. MM didn't make OoT look like an inferior demo version. Neither did Link's Awakening with A Link to the Past. If BotW looks that bad in some comparisons to TotK, there's definitely going something very wrong. Nintendo grew tired of the repetitive traditional Zelda formular but I hope they won't make the new concept/formular as repetitive as well. And honestly, at least older Zelda still had their dungeons as a mega + argument, with the new formular, things can get stacked much more because aside of overworld exploration, freedom and creativity of the gameplay, there's not much which the new formular can really offer to.
Now, this post is gonna be full of rant in many parts, so on those people who don't agree with this at all, y'all can simply ignore the rest of this post. Of those who at least partially agree with my takes, I'll show why I rant so much about these things:
I still hate how they changed the dungeon formular. I've played good hours in TotK and yes, it is a very funny Zelda game and it is easily a 8/10, in contrast to BotW which is now a 6/10 imo, but it is clear that dungeons have a very small priority in the new Zelda formular. I'm baffled. They rather develop 152 fucking shrines, some were even better designed than the actual dungeons lmao, instead of keeping the numbers rather small whilst working on 6 - 7 extra large dungeons. Elden Ring demonstrated it perfectly. Even the starting main dungeon, Stormveil Castle, unironically was larger than the largest dungeon in TotK. That's sad man. They gave zero fucks to the dungeons and I'm sure they did it so the fans can shut up finally - that's my impression of how they designed these 6 dungeons. At least in BotW, they had the excuse that they had to cut lots of content and the fact of them developing such a large open-world Zelda being extremely time-consuming, considering the fact that they spent years on the game engine. But TotK? There's no excuses. They had approximately 6 years of development. They managed to triple the map's size. And they also created 152 (!) shrines - far more than even BotW - so that was their conclusion? So yeah, dungeons weren't just their priority. As disappointing as it is, I fully expect future Zelda games to have similar structure. Nope: I'm expecting how future Zelda games might even have less focus on Zelda dungeons. I'll explain why:
Sure, TotK had themed dungeons again but the execution of 4 to 6 dungeons is just extremely terrible. Before I speak about the negative things in general, I'll explain what I liked or not about these dungeons. I'll elaborate via ranking:
6th: Water Temple. It is the saddest, most plainness, lazy designed dungeon I've ever seen in a Zelda game. It only has one floor (I don't even count the basement since it contains only one small room) which is based on small sky islands. You can also easily reach them, there is no navigation whatsoever and there's only around 5 entire puzzles which can be solved in few minutes. Forget fighting through complex rooms, everything is completely open and that's the main issue about this dungeon. It has the gravity + water theme but I saw little of that shit. The most ironic thing is that the way to the Water Temple would be a much better part of the dungeon if it was actually included into the entire dungeon. Why creating puzzles of floating bubbles, rivers which you can swim when it barely appears in the actual dungeon? How cool would it be if the dungeon contained of large multi-layered floating buildings which you have to traverse in order to activate the 4 - 5 terminals? It would give this theme a meaning at least.
No dungeon keys, no closed doors, no inner rooms, it was pure boring. Vah Ruta is unironically better than the Water Temple. And BotW has 4 identical boring dungeons. That's how bad it is.
5th: Hyrule Castle. Well, it is better than the Water Temple - which isn't surprising at all - but it is basically a far weaker version than the BotW one and whilst I expected some changes in the dungeon layout, nothing was different about this dungeon. I still enjoyed it but it was just some cat chasing mouse game in which you had 4 checkpoints in which you saw Zelda who vanished and spammed monsters on you. That was all. But I'd say Hyrule Castle was more like the Forsaken Fortress in Wind Waker, that's why I don't really mind that it's different to the other dungeons.
4th: Construct Factory. Well, well, well - who was hyped and anticipated seeing the Spirit Temple and the actual dungeon is... the Construct Factory which doesn't even have a map. Navigation = 0. But unlike the Water Temple, I actually enjoyed the puzzles and it was fun building up Mineru's robot. The issue is... I thought this was just some questline again before you reach the actual dungeon, being the Spirit Temple. So when I was doing this quest I always thought "Man, I can't wait to see the actual dungeon. When it is the turn?" and when I reached the Spirit Temple I thought "Finally! We're moving on to the actual Spirit Temple! I'm expecting that the theme will be pure darkness in which you can light the rooms with Brightbloom Seeds whilst navigating with Mineru's robot. I hope it'll be a rather large dungeon!" but it was only used as a boss room.
Nah man, I'm still ranting whilst writing this post. They really just baited all diehard OoT fans by bringing up the "Spirit Temple" name only to fuck it up like that.Now, why did they decide to do a complete 180° on that? It is not an understatement to claim this dungeon was fully intented to use the essence of BotW/TotK identity: pure freedom of exploration. You had an open field of several buildings with an objection and they were basically your terminal spots. Hence it fully used the open-air formular to its fullest. I said above how Nintendo might even have less focus on Zelda dungeons - this dungeon is the reason why I think so. It is highly likely that they'll keep this particular dungeon formular of Construct Factory and will do future dungeons just like that. Tbh, I don't like that one bit. The feeling of feeling lost in a rather large dungeon without a dungeon map. Navigating through this massive labyrinth, finding secret paths - this might no longer happen.
Hence I don't really count this as a traditional dungeon as well. Again, even Divine Beasts had more sense of tradition than that. Everyone can base their opinion whatever they like about but as I said, it wouldn't wonder me if those dungeons will be common from now on.
3th: Wind Temple. How ironic that the starting dungeon is better than half of the other dungeons, especially the last one. Yes, it only has 1 floor and 2 basements but the puzzles were fun, the dungeon layout was decent, dungeon design was really great and it greatly reminded me of the Sandship in Skyward Sword. And the boss, oh, especially the boss was 100/10 of this entire dungeon. But at the end, aside of the boss, there wasn't anything extraordinary about this dungeon. It was a decent first dungeon, not the most terrible but not the greatest. Imo TP's Forest Temple was way better.
2th: Fire Temple. Finally a themed dungeon which actually had the proper length of a traditional dungeon. From now, these two dungeons have the most connection to traditional dungeons and imo they are not weaker than a majority of them. With 5 floors, good dungeon layout, buildings and rooms and the mining cart puzzles overall connected very well to the theme of this dungeon. I needed a whole hour and some more to finish this dungeon and I finally felt like it was something more than just "Throw some random rooms filed with few puzzles and call it a day". It had proper navigation, I often had to look at the dungeon map to understand the layout, how all tracks are connected to each other and so on. The Zonai devices were also effectively used for lava puzzles.
This dungeon beats all Divine Beasts neg diff. I was really glad they kept it so close to traditional dungeons like that.
1th: Lightning Temple. This dungeon also beats several other traditional dungeons. The whole dungeon felt like Indiana Jones and they finally added light puzzles in which you had to use the mirror (shield) again. And there was also more enemy variety with the gibdos. Puzzles were challenging and funny. Dungeon layout complex and large, it had around 8 floors iirc and the dungeon boss was also very cool. I liked how you fought Queen Gibdo twice; it already started before the actual dungeon.
This dungeon was the closest to traditional dungeons. They did nothing wrong with it which was bound to the game's limitations.
Now that's it for my ranking.
I left out the following issues because I want to address them outside the ranking because they are rather a general issues of the dungeons and not necessarily a negative point of an individual dungeon: The terminals. No keys. No struggle to find navigation via finding the dungeon map. No compass.
The most problematic one are the terminals.
It is not the problem that the terminals exist - they are clearly meant to replace the master key and I actually like the idea of finding 4 - 5 pieces of the "master key". It is also way better than finding one single master key in a chest. But the execution is a major issue since BotW.
In BotW, we had the excuse that Divine Beasts just function differently to traditional dungeons and this was somewhat alright. But in TotK? We had themed dungeons and the whole focus was laid on finding 4 - 5 terminal spots when you immediately enter the dungeon, aside of Lightning Temple but I'll explain later on. I don't like how the entirety of almost all dungeons are purely centered around those terminals. At least in BotW you had to activate the first (!) terminal to get the dungeon map but in TotK, it already started. They immediately slap you with "You have to activate 4 - 5 terminals! Go and find them!" and they are even located into your fucking map.
Where's the surprise? Where's the reason of logic to find them in the first place? I cannot believe that they performed this terrible design decision and didn't even change it. No, they did it even worse. You have 4 dungeons were the majority of puzzles are only centered around those terminals. I'm not kidding. In the Water Temple, you have the 1st floor with the 4 sky islands and 3 of those terminals are located there. So you enter the dungeon -> basic sage speech about finding the terminals -> the dungeon begins and you already got the objection of finding those terminals -> you "navigate" through the dungeon -> you immediately have to solve the puzzles -> congratulation, you have solved 3-4 puzzles and you activated 3 terminals as well. Oh, there's one left? Then go to the basement and see what you have to do there. Oh, there is only one room? Okay, do that puzzle - oh, you activated the terminal as well? Well then, now go to the boss room, activate the "boss door" and fight the boss.I'm not kidding again, this was the entire narrative of 3 dungeons in TotK!!!!!! Construct Factory had 12 puzzles with 4 mechanical body parts which also work like terminals. Why 12 puzzles? Each building has two sections which contains one puzzle: 2. When you got that mechanical body, you have to transport this onto the central part of the dungeon which is another puzzle. So 3 puzzles for each building and there are only 4 buildings. Hyrule Castle isn't technically a dungeon like the others but we gotta stay consistent.
How much of a joke is it that the Fire Temple and the Lightning Temple did way more than that? They actually feel like whole dungeons and the puzzles are not completely centered around fucking terminals! You have the mining carts and the tracks in the Fire Temple. You often had to navigate through the dungeon to orientate yourself properly. You often had to use Zonai devices. Sure, even this dungeon basically slaps you with "Activate the terminals! Go and find them!" straight at the start of the Fire Temple but the implemention is at least way better than the other ones.
This is the part when the Lightning Temple did a complete "F*ck you!" on all those dungeons when it included a whole section in which you had to navigate throughout the corridors and rooms before you reached the room to activate the first terminal. And in this entire section, you had to solve some Indiana Jones puzzles whilst fighting gibdos. Then it was basically like the Fire Temple but even better performed.
But that's the thing: The Lightning Temple actually included a seperate section in which the terminals are not even included. They are meant to be the master key(s), so why are they already making up 80% of the entire dungeon? The search of the master key should only appear near the middle or end of the dungeon, otherwise you cannot properly do puzzles which focuses on proper exploration and navigation throughout the dungeon. And almost all of TotK dungeons perfectly demonstrate it.
I mentioned the absolute lack of dungeon keys. Well, the question is, why no dungeon keys? Some backtracking through the dungeon wouldn't hurt and dungeon keys are often use to make progression throughout the dungeon more stacking, as it should be. The objection should be to explore the layout of the dungeon, especially looking at chests, to make sure you find the proper item to open a locked door in order to progress further. Sure, there were some locked doors in those dungeons but the thing is, they were heavily tied to puzzles in the very same room and it didn't require a small key to open these. How often did it happen in older Zelda games that you suddenly saw a locked door which prevented your progression? So there was no way to look up at the small key to open the locked door - hence backtracking through the dungeon. Again, this isn't even bad. Dungeons are meant to be dungeons after all.
The worst thing is that small keys do appear in some shrines and oh wonders, they have the same objection like older Zelda games. Shrines can be solved very individually right? Yet it didn't damage this feeling of exploration by using dungeon keys. It made progression more difficult and you actually had to look out very carefully at certain chests to find the dungeon key.
Isn't it extremely ironic how traditional dungeon items are used in non-traditional Zelda mini-dungeons instead of the actual dungeons? But okay, I guess there wouldn't be much of sense implementing dungeon keys in 5 very small sky islands called "Water Temple". Heck, a majority of Sky Islands were significantly larger than the Water Temple. How sad is that?
I already explained very well about dungeon traversing above but I still have some stuff to be explained. It doesn't make sense to make the walls of dungeons completely climbable, it completely defeats the purpose of those dungeons, especially when it is centered around puzzles. I highly praised the Fire Temple - but only if you exactly follow the narrative of those puzzles as intended. You sure can do the mining cart stuff but you can also just skip this part since you can easily climb the walls on those buildings. And on the Lightning Temple you can use Ascend to skip some floors as well. There should be made some restrictions, it is necessary. Shrines also have those restrictions. You cannot just climb your way through puzzles when it is convenient. Solving puzzles differently actually requires much harder struggle. But well, at least there are no restrictions on Ascend but mostly, shrines are so build that there's no real use cheating your way through Ascend, unlike the dungeons.
One last thing: BotW/TotK dungeons are a very small priority in new Zelda formular and unfortunately, this is very evident. I mean, they got lots of critics of too many shrines and them being similar. Nintendo gave zero fucks and even increased the shrine numbers on +32.
A majority of them having the same issues. Sure, some shrines were really cool and even better than the best BotW shrines but honestly, you can easily cut 80 other shrines and they would still shine a lot, maybe even far better. Hell, some shrines even have very similar puzzles of the actual dungeons. But why "very similar" instead of "same puzzles"? Because those shrines did those puzzles way better than the main dungeons. I can only include Elden Ring again. This game has around 50 mini dungeons or so but they were all fun and they obviously didn't take the spotlight of the actual main dungeons which were still very large and funny. In contrast to Elden Ring, we have TotK doing the absolute opposite. It's such a joke. We clearly have 3 unfinished, boring and terrible "dungeons" with very lazy design while they were busy developing 32 more shrines. A lot of content would be saved if they simply used the content of those shrines into the actual dungeons...
In conclusion: They didn't only change the dungeon formular but also the priority of those dungeons. Their new dungeon formular are the shrines. That's what they used as immediate marketing in the very first trailers of BotW and TotK? We saw shrines instead of actual dungeons. Guess why? It's because they are the new dungeons and Nintendo wants to put the narrative and focus entirely on those new dungeons, worth of hundreds. Those 4 or 6 are just "extra dungeons" to shut up those traditional fans. They nearly have no priority as the shrines. That's why Nintendo barely promoted themed dungeons in TotK and that's why Nintendo confirmed themed dungeons only shortly before the release of the game. Because that's all we're gonna get.
Maybe future Zelda dungeons might have higher priority or not but again, I highly doubt we're gonna get a large amount of good dungeons again. At best we're gonna get 1 - 2 good dungeons if it even stays at that lmao.
@Elder Lee Hung @EmperorKinyagi @Buusatan94 @Playa4321 @Shimotsuki Ghostly @Cross_Marian @TheKnightOfTheSea
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It's been a while since I last wrote in this thread but before I really wanted to give my input about TotK (and the dungeons), I had to play the game a lot more. Here's my insight about what I think about the whole direction of the new Zelda games so far, especially when it comes to dungeons.
First of all, Aonuma confirmed that they're not doing a large DLC part of Zelda TotK. Imo it's definitely good since they now can move on from the entire BotW/AoC/TotK stuff.
They also confirmed that they're gonna keep the open air formular when it comes to future Zelda games.
I hope they are not gonna be BotW copies. Despite TotK changing so much stuff, it still felt very similar to BotW in which some lesser changes would make the comparison more dangerous. And honestly, BotW looks like a demo version of TotK and imo this is definitely not good. MM didn't make OoT look like an inferior demo version. Neither did Link's Awakening with A Link to the Past. If BotW looks that bad in some comparisons to TotK, there's definitely going something very wrong. Nintendo grew tired of the repetitive traditional Zelda formular but I hope they won't make the new concept/formular as repetitive as well. And honestly, at least older Zelda still had their dungeons as a mega + argument, with the new formular, things can get stacked much more because aside of overworld exploration, freedom and creativity of the gameplay, there's not much which the new formular can really offer to.
Now, this post is gonna be full of rant in many parts, so on those people who don't agree with this at all, y'all can simply ignore the rest of this post. Of those who at least partially agree with my takes, I'll show why I rant so much about these things:
I still hate how they changed the dungeon formular. I've played good hours in TotK and yes, it is a very funny Zelda game and it is easily a 8/10, in contrast to BotW which is now a 6/10 imo, but it is clear that dungeons have a very small priority in the new Zelda formular. I'm baffled. They rather develop 152 fucking shrines, some were even better designed than the actual dungeons lmao, instead of keeping the numbers rather small whilst working on 6 - 7 extra large dungeons. Elden Ring demonstrated it perfectly. Even the starting main dungeon, Stormveil Castle, unironically was larger than the largest dungeon in TotK. That's sad man. They gave zero fucks to the dungeons and I'm sure they did it so the fans can shut up finally - that's my impression of how they designed these 6 dungeons. At least in BotW, they had the excuse that they had to cut lots of content and the fact of them developing such a large open-world Zelda being extremely time-consuming, considering the fact that they spent years on the game engine. But TotK? There's no excuses. They had approximately 6 years of development. They managed to triple the map's size. And they also created 152 (!) shrines - far more than even BotW - so that was their conclusion? So yeah, dungeons weren't just their priority. As disappointing as it is, I fully expect future Zelda games to have similar structure. Nope: I'm expecting how future Zelda games might even have less focus on Zelda dungeons. I'll explain why:
Sure, TotK had themed dungeons again but the execution of 4 to 6 dungeons is just extremely terrible. Before I speak about the negative things in general, I'll explain what I liked or not about these dungeons. I'll elaborate via ranking:
6th: Water Temple. It is the saddest, most plainness, lazy designed dungeon I've ever seen in a Zelda game. It only has one floor (I don't even count the basement since it contains only one small room) which is based on small sky islands. You can also easily reach them, there is no navigation whatsoever and there's only around 5 entire puzzles which can be solved in few minutes. Forget fighting through complex rooms, everything is completely open and that's the main issue about this dungeon. It has the gravity + water theme but I saw little of that shit. The most ironic thing is that the way to the Water Temple would be a much better part of the dungeon if it was actually included into the entire dungeon. Why creating puzzles of floating bubbles, rivers which you can swim when it barely appears in the actual dungeon? How cool would it be if the dungeon contained of large multi-layered floating buildings which you have to traverse in order to activate the 4 - 5 terminals? It would give this theme a meaning at least.
No dungeon keys, no closed doors, no inner rooms, it was pure boring. Vah Ruta is unironically better than the Water Temple. And BotW has 4 identical boring dungeons. That's how bad it is.
5th: Hyrule Castle. Well, it is better than the Water Temple - which isn't surprising at all - but it is basically a far weaker version than the BotW one and whilst I expected some changes in the dungeon layout, nothing was different about this dungeon. I still enjoyed it but it was just some cat chasing mouse game in which you had 4 checkpoints in which you saw Zelda who vanished and spammed monsters on you. That was all. But I'd say Hyrule Castle was more like the Forsaken Fortress in Wind Waker, that's why I don't really mind that it's different to the other dungeons.
4th: Construct Factory. Well, well, well - who was hyped and anticipated seeing the Spirit Temple and the actual dungeon is... the Construct Factory which doesn't even have a map. Navigation = 0. But unlike the Water Temple, I actually enjoyed the puzzles and it was fun building up Mineru's robot. The issue is... I thought this was just some questline again before you reach the actual dungeon, being the Spirit Temple. So when I was doing this quest I always thought "Man, I can't wait to see the actual dungeon. When it is the turn?" and when I reached the Spirit Temple I thought "Finally! We're moving on to the actual Spirit Temple! I'm expecting that the theme will be pure darkness in which you can light the rooms with Brightbloom Seeds whilst navigating with Mineru's robot. I hope it'll be a rather large dungeon!" but it was only used as a boss room. Nah man, I'm still ranting whilst writing this post. They really just baited all diehard OoT fans by bringing up the "Spirit Temple" name only to fuck it up like that.
Now, why did they decide to do a complete 180° on that? It is not an understatement to claim this dungeon was fully intented to use the essence of BotW/TotK identity: pure freedom of exploration. You had an open field of several buildings with an objection and they were basically your terminal spots. Hence it fully used the open-air formular to its fullest. I said above how Nintendo might even have less focus on Zelda dungeons - this dungeon is the reason why I think so. It is highly likely that they'll keep this particular dungeon formular of Construct Factory and will do future dungeons just like that. Tbh, I don't like that one bit. The feeling of feeling lost in a rather large dungeon without a dungeon map. Navigating through this massive labyrinth, finding secret paths - this might no longer happen.
Hence I don't really count this as a traditional dungeon as well. Again, even Divine Beasts had more sense of tradition than that. Everyone can base their opinion whatever they like about but as I said, it wouldn't wonder me if those dungeons will be common from now on.
3th: Wind Temple. How ironic that the starting dungeon is better than half of the other dungeons, especially the last one. Yes, it only has 1 floor and 2 basements but the puzzles were fun, the dungeon layout was decent, dungeon design was really great and it greatly reminded me of the Sandship in Skyward Sword. And the boss, oh, especially the boss was 100/10 of this entire dungeon. But at the end, aside of the boss, there wasn't anything extraordinary about this dungeon. It was a decent first dungeon, not the most terrible but not the greatest. Imo TP's Forest Temple was way better.
2th: Fire Temple. Finally a themed dungeon which actually had the proper length of a traditional dungeon. From now, these two dungeons have the most connection to traditional dungeons and imo they are not weaker than a majority of them. With 5 floors, good dungeon layout, buildings and rooms and the mining cart puzzles overall connected very well to the theme of this dungeon. I needed a whole hour and some more to finish this dungeon and I finally felt like it was something more than just "Throw some random rooms filed with few puzzles and call it a day". It had proper navigation, I often had to look at the dungeon map to understand the layout, how all tracks are connected to each other and so on. The Zonai devices were also effectively used for lava puzzles.
This dungeon beats all Divine Beasts neg diff. I was really glad they kept it so close to traditional dungeons like that.
1th: Lightning Temple. This dungeon also beats several other traditional dungeons. The whole dungeon felt like Indiana Jones and they finally added light puzzles in which you had to use the mirror (shield) again. And there was also more enemy variety with the gibdos. Puzzles were challenging and funny. Dungeon layout complex and large, it had around 8 floors iirc and the dungeon boss was also very cool. I liked how you fought Queen Gibdo twice; it already started before the actual dungeon.
This dungeon was the closest to traditional dungeons. They did nothing wrong with it which was bound to the game's limitations.
Now that's it for my ranking.
I left out the following issues because I want to address them outside the ranking because they are rather a general issues of the dungeons and not necessarily a negative point of an individual dungeon: The terminals. No keys. No struggle to find navigation via finding the dungeon map. No compass.
The most problematic one are the terminals.
It is not the problem that the terminals exist - they are clearly meant to replace the master key and I actually like the idea of finding 4 - 5 pieces of the "master key". It is also way better than finding one single master key in a chest. But the execution is a major issue since BotW.
In BotW, we had the excuse that Divine Beasts just function differently to traditional dungeons and this was somewhat alright. But in TotK? We had themed dungeons and the whole focus was laid on finding 4 - 5 terminal spots when you immediately enter the dungeon, aside of Lightning Temple but I'll explain later on. I don't like how the entirety of almost all dungeons are purely centered around those terminals. At least in BotW you had to activate the first (!) terminal to get the dungeon map but in TotK, it already started. They immediately slap you with "You have to activate 4 - 5 terminals! Go and find them!" and they are even located into your fucking map. Where's the surprise? Where's the reason of logic to find them in the first place? I cannot believe that they performed this terrible design decision and didn't even change it. No, they did it even worse. You have 4 dungeons were the majority of puzzles are only centered around those terminals. I'm not kidding. In the Water Temple, you have the 1st floor with the 4 sky islands and 3 of those terminals are located there. So you enter the dungeon -> basic sage speech about finding the terminals -> the dungeon begins and you already got the objection of finding those terminals -> you "navigate" through the dungeon -> you immediately have to solve the puzzles -> congratulation, you have solved 3-4 puzzles and you activated 3 terminals as well. Oh, there's one left? Then go to the basement and see what you have to do there. Oh, there is only one room? Okay, do that puzzle - oh, you activated the terminal as well? Well then, now go to the boss room, activate the "boss door" and fight the boss.
I'm not kidding again, this was the entire narrative of 3 dungeons in TotK!!!!!! Construct Factory had 12 puzzles with 4 mechanical body parts which also work like terminals. Why 12 puzzles? Each building has two sections which contains one puzzle: 2. When you got that mechanical body, you have to transport this onto the central part of the dungeon which is another puzzle. So 3 puzzles for each building and there are only 4 buildings. Hyrule Castle isn't technically a dungeon like the others but we gotta stay consistent.
How much of a joke is it that the Fire Temple and the Lightning Temple did way more than that? They actually feel like whole dungeons and the puzzles are not completely centered around fucking terminals! You have the mining carts and the tracks in the Fire Temple. You often had to navigate through the dungeon to orientate yourself properly. You often had to use Zonai devices. Sure, even this dungeon basically slaps you with "Activate the terminals! Go and find them!" straight at the start of the Fire Temple but the implemention is at least way better than the other ones.
This is the part when the Lightning Temple did a complete "F*ck you!" on all those dungeons when it included a whole section in which you had to navigate throughout the corridors and rooms before you reached the room to activate the first terminal. And in this entire section, you had to solve some Indiana Jones puzzles whilst fighting gibdos. Then it was basically like the Fire Temple but even better performed.
But that's the thing: The Lightning Temple actually included a seperate section in which the terminals are not even included. They are meant to be the master key(s), so why are they already making up 80% of the entire dungeon? The search of the master key should only appear near the middle or end of the dungeon, otherwise you cannot properly do puzzles which focuses on proper exploration and navigation throughout the dungeon. And almost all of TotK dungeons perfectly demonstrate it.
I mentioned the absolute lack of dungeon keys. Well, the question is, why no dungeon keys? Some backtracking through the dungeon wouldn't hurt and dungeon keys are often use to make progression throughout the dungeon more stacking, as it should be. The objection should be to explore the layout of the dungeon, especially looking at chests, to make sure you find the proper item to open a locked door in order to progress further. Sure, there were some locked doors in those dungeons but the thing is, they were heavily tied to puzzles in the very same room and it didn't require a small key to open these. How often did it happen in older Zelda games that you suddenly saw a locked door which prevented your progression? So there was no way to look up at the small key to open the locked door - hence backtracking through the dungeon. Again, this isn't even bad. Dungeons are meant to be dungeons after all.
The worst thing is that small keys do appear in some shrines and oh wonders, they have the same objection like older Zelda games. Shrines can be solved very individually right? Yet it didn't damage this feeling of exploration by using dungeon keys. It made progression more difficult and you actually had to look out very carefully at certain chests to find the dungeon key.
Isn't it extremely ironic how traditional dungeon items are used in non-traditional Zelda mini-dungeons instead of the actual dungeons? But okay, I guess there wouldn't be much of sense implementing dungeon keys in 5 very small sky islands called "Water Temple". Heck, a majority of Sky Islands were significantly larger than the Water Temple. How sad is that?
I already explained very well about dungeon traversing above but I still have some stuff to be explained. It doesn't make sense to make the walls of dungeons completely climbable, it completely defeats the purpose of those dungeons, especially when it is centered around puzzles. I highly praised the Fire Temple - but only if you exactly follow the narrative of those puzzles as intended. You sure can do the mining cart stuff but you can also just skip this part since you can easily climb the walls on those buildings. And on the Lightning Temple you can use Ascend to skip some floors as well. There should be made some restrictions, it is necessary. Shrines also have those restrictions. You cannot just climb your way through puzzles when it is convenient. Solving puzzles differently actually requires much harder struggle. But well, at least there are no restrictions on Ascend but mostly, shrines are so build that there's no real use cheating your way through Ascend, unlike the dungeons.
One last thing: BotW/TotK dungeons are a very small priority in new Zelda formular and unfortunately, this is very evident. I mean, they got lots of critics of too many shrines and them being similar. Nintendo gave zero fucks and even increased the shrine numbers on +32. A majority of them having the same issues. Sure, some shrines were really cool and even better than the best BotW shrines but honestly, you can easily cut 80 other shrines and they would still shine a lot, maybe even far better. Hell, some shrines even have very similar puzzles of the actual dungeons. But why "very similar" instead of "same puzzles"? Because those shrines did those puzzles way better than the main dungeons.
I can only include Elden Ring again. This game has around 50 mini dungeons or so but they were all fun and they obviously didn't take the spotlight of the actual main dungeons which were still very large and funny. In contrast to Elden Ring, we have TotK doing the absolute opposite. It's such a joke. We clearly have 3 unfinished, boring and terrible "dungeons" with very lazy design while they were busy developing 32 more shrines. A lot of content would be saved if they simply used the content of those shrines into the actual dungeons...
In conclusion: They didn't only change the dungeon formular but also the priority of those dungeons. Their new dungeon formular are the shrines. That's what they used as immediate marketing in the very first trailers of BotW and TotK? We saw shrines instead of actual dungeons. Guess why? It's because they are the new dungeons and Nintendo wants to put the narrative and focus entirely on those new dungeons, worth of hundreds. Those 4 or 6 are just "extra dungeons" to shut up those traditional fans. They nearly have no priority as the shrines. That's why Nintendo barely promoted themed dungeons in TotK and that's why Nintendo confirmed themed dungeons only shortly before the release of the game. Because that's all we're gonna get.
Maybe future Zelda dungeons might have higher priority or not but again, I highly doubt we're gonna get a large amount of good dungeons again. At best we're gonna get 1 - 2 good dungeons if it even stays at that lmao.
@Elder Lee Hung @EmperorKinyagi @Buusatan94 @Playa4321 @Shimotsuki Ghostly @Cross_Marian @TheKnightOfTheSea
First of all, Aonuma confirmed that they're not doing a large DLC part of Zelda TotK. Imo it's definitely good since they now can move on from the entire BotW/AoC/TotK stuff.
They also confirmed that they're gonna keep the open air formular when it comes to future Zelda games.
I hope they are not gonna be BotW copies. Despite TotK changing so much stuff, it still felt very similar to BotW in which some lesser changes would make the comparison more dangerous. And honestly, BotW looks like a demo version of TotK and imo this is definitely not good. MM didn't make OoT look like an inferior demo version. Neither did Link's Awakening with A Link to the Past. If BotW looks that bad in some comparisons to TotK, there's definitely going something very wrong. Nintendo grew tired of the repetitive traditional Zelda formular but I hope they won't make the new concept/formular as repetitive as well. And honestly, at least older Zelda still had their dungeons as a mega + argument, with the new formular, things can get stacked much more because aside of overworld exploration, freedom and creativity of the gameplay, there's not much which the new formular can really offer to.
Now, this post is gonna be full of rant in many parts, so on those people who don't agree with this at all, y'all can simply ignore the rest of this post. Of those who at least partially agree with my takes, I'll show why I rant so much about these things:
I still hate how they changed the dungeon formular. I've played good hours in TotK and yes, it is a very funny Zelda game and it is easily a 8/10, in contrast to BotW which is now a 6/10 imo, but it is clear that dungeons have a very small priority in the new Zelda formular. I'm baffled. They rather develop 152 fucking shrines, some were even better designed than the actual dungeons lmao, instead of keeping the numbers rather small whilst working on 6 - 7 extra large dungeons. Elden Ring demonstrated it perfectly. Even the starting main dungeon, Stormveil Castle, unironically was larger than the largest dungeon in TotK. That's sad man. They gave zero fucks to the dungeons and I'm sure they did it so the fans can shut up finally - that's my impression of how they designed these 6 dungeons. At least in BotW, they had the excuse that they had to cut lots of content and the fact of them developing such a large open-world Zelda being extremely time-consuming, considering the fact that they spent years on the game engine. But TotK? There's no excuses. They had approximately 6 years of development. They managed to triple the map's size. And they also created 152 (!) shrines - far more than even BotW - so that was their conclusion? So yeah, dungeons weren't just their priority. As disappointing as it is, I fully expect future Zelda games to have similar structure. Nope: I'm expecting how future Zelda games might even have less focus on Zelda dungeons. I'll explain why:
Sure, TotK had themed dungeons again but the execution of 4 to 6 dungeons is just extremely terrible. Before I speak about the negative things in general, I'll explain what I liked or not about these dungeons. I'll elaborate via ranking:
6th: Water Temple. It is the saddest, most plainness, lazy designed dungeon I've ever seen in a Zelda game. It only has one floor (I don't even count the basement since it contains only one small room) which is based on small sky islands. You can also easily reach them, there is no navigation whatsoever and there's only around 5 entire puzzles which can be solved in few minutes. Forget fighting through complex rooms, everything is completely open and that's the main issue about this dungeon. It has the gravity + water theme but I saw little of that shit. The most ironic thing is that the way to the Water Temple would be a much better part of the dungeon if it was actually included into the entire dungeon. Why creating puzzles of floating bubbles, rivers which you can swim when it barely appears in the actual dungeon? How cool would it be if the dungeon contained of large multi-layered floating buildings which you have to traverse in order to activate the 4 - 5 terminals? It would give this theme a meaning at least.
No dungeon keys, no closed doors, no inner rooms, it was pure boring. Vah Ruta is unironically better than the Water Temple. And BotW has 4 identical boring dungeons. That's how bad it is.
5th: Hyrule Castle. Well, it is better than the Water Temple - which isn't surprising at all - but it is basically a far weaker version than the BotW one and whilst I expected some changes in the dungeon layout, nothing was different about this dungeon. I still enjoyed it but it was just some cat chasing mouse game in which you had 4 checkpoints in which you saw Zelda who vanished and spammed monsters on you. That was all. But I'd say Hyrule Castle was more like the Forsaken Fortress in Wind Waker, that's why I don't really mind that it's different to the other dungeons.
4th: Construct Factory. Well, well, well - who was hyped and anticipated seeing the Spirit Temple and the actual dungeon is... the Construct Factory which doesn't even have a map. Navigation = 0. But unlike the Water Temple, I actually enjoyed the puzzles and it was fun building up Mineru's robot. The issue is... I thought this was just some questline again before you reach the actual dungeon, being the Spirit Temple. So when I was doing this quest I always thought "Man, I can't wait to see the actual dungeon. When it is the turn?" and when I reached the Spirit Temple I thought "Finally! We're moving on to the actual Spirit Temple! I'm expecting that the theme will be pure darkness in which you can light the rooms with Brightbloom Seeds whilst navigating with Mineru's robot. I hope it'll be a rather large dungeon!" but it was only used as a boss room.
Nah man, I'm still ranting whilst writing this post. They really just baited all diehard OoT fans by bringing up the "Spirit Temple" name only to fuck it up like that.Now, why did they decide to do a complete 180° on that? It is not an understatement to claim this dungeon was fully intented to use the essence of BotW/TotK identity: pure freedom of exploration. You had an open field of several buildings with an objection and they were basically your terminal spots. Hence it fully used the open-air formular to its fullest. I said above how Nintendo might even have less focus on Zelda dungeons - this dungeon is the reason why I think so. It is highly likely that they'll keep this particular dungeon formular of Construct Factory and will do future dungeons just like that. Tbh, I don't like that one bit. The feeling of feeling lost in a rather large dungeon without a dungeon map. Navigating through this massive labyrinth, finding secret paths - this might no longer happen.
Hence I don't really count this as a traditional dungeon as well. Again, even Divine Beasts had more sense of tradition than that. Everyone can base their opinion whatever they like about but as I said, it wouldn't wonder me if those dungeons will be common from now on.
3th: Wind Temple. How ironic that the starting dungeon is better than half of the other dungeons, especially the last one. Yes, it only has 1 floor and 2 basements but the puzzles were fun, the dungeon layout was decent, dungeon design was really great and it greatly reminded me of the Sandship in Skyward Sword. And the boss, oh, especially the boss was 100/10 of this entire dungeon. But at the end, aside of the boss, there wasn't anything extraordinary about this dungeon. It was a decent first dungeon, not the most terrible but not the greatest. Imo TP's Forest Temple was way better.
2th: Fire Temple. Finally a themed dungeon which actually had the proper length of a traditional dungeon. From now, these two dungeons have the most connection to traditional dungeons and imo they are not weaker than a majority of them. With 5 floors, good dungeon layout, buildings and rooms and the mining cart puzzles overall connected very well to the theme of this dungeon. I needed a whole hour and some more to finish this dungeon and I finally felt like it was something more than just "Throw some random rooms filed with few puzzles and call it a day". It had proper navigation, I often had to look at the dungeon map to understand the layout, how all tracks are connected to each other and so on. The Zonai devices were also effectively used for lava puzzles.
This dungeon beats all Divine Beasts neg diff. I was really glad they kept it so close to traditional dungeons like that.
1th: Lightning Temple. This dungeon also beats several other traditional dungeons. The whole dungeon felt like Indiana Jones and they finally added light puzzles in which you had to use the mirror (shield) again. And there was also more enemy variety with the gibdos. Puzzles were challenging and funny. Dungeon layout complex and large, it had around 8 floors iirc and the dungeon boss was also very cool. I liked how you fought Queen Gibdo twice; it already started before the actual dungeon.
This dungeon was the closest to traditional dungeons. They did nothing wrong with it which was bound to the game's limitations.
Now that's it for my ranking.
I left out the following issues because I want to address them outside the ranking because they are rather a general issues of the dungeons and not necessarily a negative point of an individual dungeon: The terminals. No keys. No struggle to find navigation via finding the dungeon map. No compass.
The most problematic one are the terminals.
It is not the problem that the terminals exist - they are clearly meant to replace the master key and I actually like the idea of finding 4 - 5 pieces of the "master key". It is also way better than finding one single master key in a chest. But the execution is a major issue since BotW.
In BotW, we had the excuse that Divine Beasts just function differently to traditional dungeons and this was somewhat alright. But in TotK? We had themed dungeons and the whole focus was laid on finding 4 - 5 terminal spots when you immediately enter the dungeon, aside of Lightning Temple but I'll explain later on. I don't like how the entirety of almost all dungeons are purely centered around those terminals. At least in BotW you had to activate the first (!) terminal to get the dungeon map but in TotK, it already started. They immediately slap you with "You have to activate 4 - 5 terminals! Go and find them!" and they are even located into your fucking map.
Where's the surprise? Where's the reason of logic to find them in the first place? I cannot believe that they performed this terrible design decision and didn't even change it. No, they did it even worse. You have 4 dungeons were the majority of puzzles are only centered around those terminals. I'm not kidding. In the Water Temple, you have the 1st floor with the 4 sky islands and 3 of those terminals are located there. So you enter the dungeon -> basic sage speech about finding the terminals -> the dungeon begins and you already got the objection of finding those terminals -> you "navigate" through the dungeon -> you immediately have to solve the puzzles -> congratulation, you have solved 3-4 puzzles and you activated 3 terminals as well. Oh, there's one left? Then go to the basement and see what you have to do there. Oh, there is only one room? Okay, do that puzzle - oh, you activated the terminal as well? Well then, now go to the boss room, activate the "boss door" and fight the boss.I'm not kidding again, this was the entire narrative of 3 dungeons in TotK!!!!!! Construct Factory had 12 puzzles with 4 mechanical body parts which also work like terminals. Why 12 puzzles? Each building has two sections which contains one puzzle: 2. When you got that mechanical body, you have to transport this onto the central part of the dungeon which is another puzzle. So 3 puzzles for each building and there are only 4 buildings. Hyrule Castle isn't technically a dungeon like the others but we gotta stay consistent.
How much of a joke is it that the Fire Temple and the Lightning Temple did way more than that? They actually feel like whole dungeons and the puzzles are not completely centered around fucking terminals! You have the mining carts and the tracks in the Fire Temple. You often had to navigate through the dungeon to orientate yourself properly. You often had to use Zonai devices. Sure, even this dungeon basically slaps you with "Activate the terminals! Go and find them!" straight at the start of the Fire Temple but the implemention is at least way better than the other ones.
This is the part when the Lightning Temple did a complete "F*ck you!" on all those dungeons when it included a whole section in which you had to navigate throughout the corridors and rooms before you reached the room to activate the first terminal. And in this entire section, you had to solve some Indiana Jones puzzles whilst fighting gibdos. Then it was basically like the Fire Temple but even better performed.
But that's the thing: The Lightning Temple actually included a seperate section in which the terminals are not even included. They are meant to be the master key(s), so why are they already making up 80% of the entire dungeon? The search of the master key should only appear near the middle or end of the dungeon, otherwise you cannot properly do puzzles which focuses on proper exploration and navigation throughout the dungeon. And almost all of TotK dungeons perfectly demonstrate it.
I mentioned the absolute lack of dungeon keys. Well, the question is, why no dungeon keys? Some backtracking through the dungeon wouldn't hurt and dungeon keys are often use to make progression throughout the dungeon more stacking, as it should be. The objection should be to explore the layout of the dungeon, especially looking at chests, to make sure you find the proper item to open a locked door in order to progress further. Sure, there were some locked doors in those dungeons but the thing is, they were heavily tied to puzzles in the very same room and it didn't require a small key to open these. How often did it happen in older Zelda games that you suddenly saw a locked door which prevented your progression? So there was no way to look up at the small key to open the locked door - hence backtracking through the dungeon. Again, this isn't even bad. Dungeons are meant to be dungeons after all.
The worst thing is that small keys do appear in some shrines and oh wonders, they have the same objection like older Zelda games. Shrines can be solved very individually right? Yet it didn't damage this feeling of exploration by using dungeon keys. It made progression more difficult and you actually had to look out very carefully at certain chests to find the dungeon key.
Isn't it extremely ironic how traditional dungeon items are used in non-traditional Zelda mini-dungeons instead of the actual dungeons? But okay, I guess there wouldn't be much of sense implementing dungeon keys in 5 very small sky islands called "Water Temple". Heck, a majority of Sky Islands were significantly larger than the Water Temple. How sad is that?
I already explained very well about dungeon traversing above but I still have some stuff to be explained. It doesn't make sense to make the walls of dungeons completely climbable, it completely defeats the purpose of those dungeons, especially when it is centered around puzzles. I highly praised the Fire Temple - but only if you exactly follow the narrative of those puzzles as intended. You sure can do the mining cart stuff but you can also just skip this part since you can easily climb the walls on those buildings. And on the Lightning Temple you can use Ascend to skip some floors as well. There should be made some restrictions, it is necessary. Shrines also have those restrictions. You cannot just climb your way through puzzles when it is convenient. Solving puzzles differently actually requires much harder struggle. But well, at least there are no restrictions on Ascend but mostly, shrines are so build that there's no real use cheating your way through Ascend, unlike the dungeons.
One last thing: BotW/TotK dungeons are a very small priority in new Zelda formular and unfortunately, this is very evident. I mean, they got lots of critics of too many shrines and them being similar. Nintendo gave zero fucks and even increased the shrine numbers on +32.
A majority of them having the same issues. Sure, some shrines were really cool and even better than the best BotW shrines but honestly, you can easily cut 80 other shrines and they would still shine a lot, maybe even far better. Hell, some shrines even have very similar puzzles of the actual dungeons. But why "very similar" instead of "same puzzles"? Because those shrines did those puzzles way better than the main dungeons. I can only include Elden Ring again. This game has around 50 mini dungeons or so but they were all fun and they obviously didn't take the spotlight of the actual main dungeons which were still very large and funny. In contrast to Elden Ring, we have TotK doing the absolute opposite. It's such a joke. We clearly have 3 unfinished, boring and terrible "dungeons" with very lazy design while they were busy developing 32 more shrines. A lot of content would be saved if they simply used the content of those shrines into the actual dungeons...
In conclusion: They didn't only change the dungeon formular but also the priority of those dungeons. Their new dungeon formular are the shrines. That's what they used as immediate marketing in the very first trailers of BotW and TotK? We saw shrines instead of actual dungeons. Guess why? It's because they are the new dungeons and Nintendo wants to put the narrative and focus entirely on those new dungeons, worth of hundreds. Those 4 or 6 are just "extra dungeons" to shut up those traditional fans. They nearly have no priority as the shrines. That's why Nintendo barely promoted themed dungeons in TotK and that's why Nintendo confirmed themed dungeons only shortly before the release of the game. Because that's all we're gonna get.
Maybe future Zelda dungeons might have higher priority or not but again, I highly doubt we're gonna get a large amount of good dungeons again. At best we're gonna get 1 - 2 good dungeons if it even stays at that lmao.
@Elder Lee Hung @EmperorKinyagi @Buusatan94 @Playa4321 @Shimotsuki Ghostly @Cross_Marian @TheKnightOfTheSea
I literally forgot every single Temple in the game shortly after completing it. When I read you ranking the Lightning temple as the best in the game, I seriously had to wrack my brain because I literally just did not remember it in the slightest.
To me the worst temple in the game, and perhaps in the history of the entire franchise, was the construct factory. I remember when the game sets up the fifth Sage as a character I’m going to have to find from scratch. She’s hidden somewhere in the world and I have no clue where she is and just have to use my own knowledge and intuition to find her. Okay, great!
So then I investigate a little bit and basically find out that she’s somehow connected to those dragon sky islands or whatever. Okay, great!
So then the dragon islands lead me to some random hole by a mountain. Okay, great!
Then I go down to some construct factory where I have to assemble this things body…and at this point I’m wondering when exactly I’m supposed to be rewarded for finding the fifth sage since by this point, I felt like it had been 3-4 hours since I tracked the damn sage down with no payoff. But okay, let’s assemble this thing’s body.
So that took like 2 fucking hours, do I now finally get rewarded for the hours and hours I’ve spent trying to track this sage down?
Yes and no. I get a giant tank form that I have absolutely zero, I repeat, absolutely zero interest in using, followed by a giant slog of powerful enemies that require me to dual equip Zonai canons and then walk around passively while the giant tank slowly and monotonously peppers my foes with Zonai lasers.
Combat in TotK and BotW has always sucked, but what these games always did well was providing unique set pieces to engage and deal with enemies in different ways. Not this time though, this time I just have to walk forward passively while my tank that I don’t want to use boringly deals with all of the enemies for me.
So that takes like another fucking hour, and I finally reach the ‘’’’’’’’boss’’’’’’’’’ of this temple which might just be the shittiest boss in Zelda history. And so finally I finish finding the fifth sage, learn almost nothing about the past that made all this worth it, and immediately de-summon this lame as tank only to never use it again until the final boss out of sheer obligation.
0/10 this temple had no redeeming qualities for me whatsoever.
Incidentally I returned to Elden Ring and did an entirely new play through with a character from scratch and found an entirely new appreciation for a game that was already one of my all time favorites lol, and I have plans to do even a third brand new character in my 350 Elden Ring hours. Meanwhile with Tears of the Kingdom…I just doubt I’ll ever go back.
I still maintain that Tears of the Kingdom was a complete and utter improvement over BotW that did take genuine risks and I really respect that, but like I said a few posts ago, I think if TotK is any indication for what the future of Zelda has in store, this franchise is really no longer Zelda for me and I don’t really have any interest in where they go from here.
Yeah I doubt we'll see a similar traditional Zelda game in this decade at least.
They will develop 2 - 3 other Zelda games with the BotW formular but at least I hope they FINALLY listen to the fan critics and change all the bad things about this game.
But like you said there are simply too many people hyping this game so I doubt Nintendo will care that much about the minority which criticises their new game.
I will say it again, filling the world with 120 - 150 mini dungeons isn't really good only because there is a vast quantity of dungeons. It robs them precious development time which they can rather invest on further overworld design/exploration or better individual dungeons.
I mean, TotK has exactly the same numbers of dungeons like Wind Waker - with Hyrule Castle and Forsaken Fortress having the same vibes as an exception among these 6 dungeons - but quality-wise, only 2 of them are at best comparable to all 6 dungeons of WW. Dragon Roost Cavern is also better than the Wind Temple as the first dungeon.
Now that you gave a detailled explanation about all the bad things about this dungeon, I think I might even have to switch the ranking of the worst dungeon in my list.
It is definitely the Construct Factory because like you said, this doesn't even feel like a dungeon. I bet if I found this dungeon on the underground by accident - without doing all that quest - I wouldn't even recognize this as a dungeon. Just as another ruins in the underground, like the others.
At least the Water Temple had a good start before you entered the dungeon and at least this has a somewhat dungeon-setting, albeit this being the laziest one ever.
If I'm done with other games, I'll play Elden Ring again.
At least I can play real dungeons there.
The Miquella's Haligtree dungeon is still the best dungeon in this game imo. It was so funny playing through this. What comes close to this is the Farum Azula dungeon. Even those two dungeons beat the Lightning Temple in TotK.
I agree.
I won't follow the next Zelda game again like that... but I can't promise this at the end lol.
I just feel that they changed too many key values of the previous Zelda games. If they wanted to do all those new things, why not create a new IP? Looking at Genshin Impact, the correct marketing would also do the new IP great things imo, especially considering that it'd be a Nintendo exclusive title. But these games simply carry the name Zelda but not quite the identity of the Zelda series. It's a shame considering I grew up with these games.
They will develop 2 - 3 other Zelda games with the BotW formular but at least I hope they FINALLY listen to the fan critics and change all the bad things about this game.
But like you said there are simply too many people hyping this game so I doubt Nintendo will care that much about the minority which criticises their new game.
I will say it again, filling the world with 120 - 150 mini dungeons isn't really good only because there is a vast quantity of dungeons. It robs them precious development time which they can rather invest on further overworld design/exploration or better individual dungeons.
I mean, TotK has exactly the same numbers of dungeons like Wind Waker - with Hyrule Castle and Forsaken Fortress having the same vibes as an exception among these 6 dungeons - but quality-wise, only 2 of them are at best comparable to all 6 dungeons of WW. Dragon Roost Cavern is also better than the Wind Temple as the first dungeon.
Now that you gave a detailled explanation about all the bad things about this dungeon, I think I might even have to switch the ranking of the worst dungeon in my list.
It is definitely the Construct Factory because like you said, this doesn't even feel like a dungeon. I bet if I found this dungeon on the underground by accident - without doing all that quest - I wouldn't even recognize this as a dungeon. Just as another ruins in the underground, like the others.
At least the Water Temple had a good start before you entered the dungeon and at least this has a somewhat dungeon-setting, albeit this being the laziest one ever.
If I'm done with other games, I'll play Elden Ring again.
At least I can play real dungeons there.
The Miquella's Haligtree dungeon is still the best dungeon in this game imo. It was so funny playing through this. What comes close to this is the Farum Azula dungeon. Even those two dungeons beat the Lightning Temple in TotK.
I agree.
I won't follow the next Zelda game again like that... but I can't promise this at the end lol.
I just feel that they changed too many key values of the previous Zelda games. If they wanted to do all those new things, why not create a new IP? Looking at Genshin Impact, the correct marketing would also do the new IP great things imo, especially considering that it'd be a Nintendo exclusive title. But these games simply carry the name Zelda but not quite the identity of the Zelda series. It's a shame considering I grew up with these games.
Gotta give it to Nintendo though, they really know the value of sustaining a 40 year IP. If BotW and TotK didn’t have Zelda’s name on the boxart, I think sales would only be like 60-70% of what they were. Having critics and fans scream from the rooftops about how great your game is is one thing, being able to nostalgia bait is another thing entirely.
This was always something that confused me about people who loved BotW. They’d be like “I never knew what I was going to see next when I was exploring!” And I’m over here like “did these people ever play a Zelda game?” I knew from the BotW tutorial that the Gorons were going to be on the mountain, I knew the Gerudo would be in the desert, that I would be seeing Zora and Rito and Koroks and Shiekah and all that…so when I did finally get to the Gerudo 60 hours in I was just like..yeah, I already knew you guys would be here…lol
This was something I loved about TotK. The Zonai and the Depths were completely new, I legit had no idea what I was doing to see next when I was exploring. And especially with a game like Elden Ring, I had absolutely no clue what I would find at any given moment of exploration.
Unfortunately I think what TotK did wrong, is there is absolutely no depth to the Zonai. What you learn about them right at the beginning of the game is as deep as they go. Look at how the game starts:
You learn that the Zonai were an advanced civilization that predated Hyrule as we know it. You learn that they farmed Zonite underground. You learn that they tried to seal Ganon and failed.
And got damn, by the end of the game, that is exactly all there is to the Zonai. There is nothing else to them at all. There is no other information left to be learned about them aside from what is literally revealed during the tutorial.
Again I feel the need to bring up Elden Ring which conceals deep mysteries from you throughout the entire game. There are mysteries about Elden Ring that still intrigue me, and that I feel the answers are still buried in some over-looked aspect of the game. The same applies to Dark Souls and its sequels which are over a decade old.
But with TotK, I just don’t see any mysteries left and I feel like my exploration to learn more about the Zonai and the Depths was fraudulent because there is just no depth there at all. What you see immediately is what you get.
This was a criticism people had about Ganondorf, he’s just generic “I’m evil and I hate the light for no reason” but that is literally every story element in TotK. Nothing has depth.
The best part of the story by far was the twist of Zelda becoming a dragon. I felt genuine thrill when I unlocked all of the memories and found her. Unfortunately this is really the only mystery I feel was worth solving in hindsight.
What they should have done is explained why Ganondorf is evil, why the Zonai created Hyrule, what exactly lead to their falling underground and being removed from Hyrule. I think that’s what TotK was missing. Having a Ganondorf who is pure evil is great, but there should be a reason for him being that evil. The Zonai are pure good with basically no flaws, and they disappeared for no reason.
Again compare this to Elden Ring. Marika is not pure good, far from it as it is under her rule that the Lands Between experienced conquests, holy wars, racial segregation, religious propaganda. The Shattering ultimately happens because of Marika’s own actions, it was she who broke up Radagon and Rennala’s marriage and exiled Godfrey. She didn’t do this because she is cruel or arrogant, she did this because she too is being forced to act this way by a parasitic extra dimensional being who gives no shits about how these people feel and just wants the Erdtree to thrive.
^There are actual depth to these plot elements. Not in TotK though, it’s just pure good vs lure evil with no depth at all.
I understand that this is a children’s game but I feel like that’s not an excuse not to have mysteries worth solving.
Idk. In hindsight I’m just not feeling the BotW/TotK games as much. Back to Skyrim lol
This was something I loved about TotK. The Zonai and the Depths were completely new, I legit had no idea what I was doing to see next when I was exploring. And especially with a game like Elden Ring, I had absolutely no clue what I would find at any given moment of exploration.
Unfortunately I think what TotK did wrong, is there is absolutely no depth to the Zonai. What you learn about them right at the beginning of the game is as deep as they go. Look at how the game starts:
You learn that the Zonai were an advanced civilization that predated Hyrule as we know it. You learn that they farmed Zonite underground. You learn that they tried to seal Ganon and failed.
And got damn, by the end of the game, that is exactly all there is to the Zonai. There is nothing else to them at all. There is no other information left to be learned about them aside from what is literally revealed during the tutorial.
Again I feel the need to bring up Elden Ring which conceals deep mysteries from you throughout the entire game. There are mysteries about Elden Ring that still intrigue me, and that I feel the answers are still buried in some over-looked aspect of the game. The same applies to Dark Souls and its sequels which are over a decade old.
But with TotK, I just don’t see any mysteries left and I feel like my exploration to learn more about the Zonai and the Depths was fraudulent because there is just no depth there at all. What you see immediately is what you get.
This was a criticism people had about Ganondorf, he’s just generic “I’m evil and I hate the light for no reason” but that is literally every story element in TotK. Nothing has depth.
The best part of the story by far was the twist of Zelda becoming a dragon. I felt genuine thrill when I unlocked all of the memories and found her. Unfortunately this is really the only mystery I feel was worth solving in hindsight.
What they should have done is explained why Ganondorf is evil, why the Zonai created Hyrule, what exactly lead to their falling underground and being removed from Hyrule. I think that’s what TotK was missing. Having a Ganondorf who is pure evil is great, but there should be a reason for him being that evil. The Zonai are pure good with basically no flaws, and they disappeared for no reason.
Again compare this to Elden Ring. Marika is not pure good, far from it as it is under her rule that the Lands Between experienced conquests, holy wars, racial segregation, religious propaganda. The Shattering ultimately happens because of Marika’s own actions, it was she who broke up Radagon and Rennala’s marriage and exiled Godfrey. She didn’t do this because she is cruel or arrogant, she did this because she too is being forced to act this way by a parasitic extra dimensional being who gives no shits about how these people feel and just wants the Erdtree to thrive.
^There are actual depth to these plot elements. Not in TotK though, it’s just pure good vs lure evil with no depth at all.
I understand that this is a children’s game but I feel like that’s not an excuse not to have mysteries worth solving.
Idk. In hindsight I’m just not feeling the BotW/TotK games as much. Back to Skyrim lol
I love botw, it’s probably my fav Zelda game with TP but when I played Totk I thought: "okay that’s enough. Give us a traditional Zelda"
Botw was refreshing and also came out during the best months of my life, so I have a special memory and connection to it.
I even enjoyed botw more than Totk
Zelda is one of the biggest Nintendo franchises and I would definitely go this following route if I worked for Nintendo:
1. Hire more talented people who love Zelda.
2. Split the Zelda Team into 3 groups:
One group for 2D Zeldas, one team for traditional 3D Zeldas and another one for Open World Zeldas.
3. Hire competent people who write better stories
the Zelda franchise deserves it and the fans too
Botw was refreshing and also came out during the best months of my life, so I have a special memory and connection to it.
I even enjoyed botw more than Totk
Zelda is one of the biggest Nintendo franchises and I would definitely go this following route if I worked for Nintendo:
1. Hire more talented people who love Zelda.
2. Split the Zelda Team into 3 groups:
One group for 2D Zeldas, one team for traditional 3D Zeldas and another one for Open World Zeldas.
3. Hire competent people who write better stories
the Zelda franchise deserves it and the fans too
The issue is that TotK feels way too similar to BotW and people have already seen many things from it. Sure, they increased the map 3x (but watch out, the sky areas are really lacking and people actually found out Nintendo cut off LOTS OF SKY ISLANDS. Imagine marketing the majority of your trailers with the sky areas and they just left out 70% of that. What a sad joke. Nintendo basically baited the entire community with large sky islands and the only equivalent thing is the starting area, everything else are just some small islands with shrine puzzles) and made the overworld even more of a sandbox, included the new "items" in which you can use your creativity to create gundam mechas lmao. But the combat is still the freaking same. No improvement whatsoever.
That's why I really don't want to see TotK being the GotY this year because if the new formular already gets this stacked and repetitive with one more game, I'm afraid they'll keep recycling repetitive shrines and all those things which are too similar to BotW because being GotY would even further prove their point how successful their game design is.
Now they can go in a completely different direction with the open-air openworld concept but I hope, it's not gonna be too similar to BotW and TotK again.
That's why I really don't want to see TotK being the GotY this year because if the new formular already gets this stacked and repetitive with one more game, I'm afraid they'll keep recycling repetitive shrines and all those things which are too similar to BotW because being GotY would even further prove their point how successful their game design is.
Now they can go in a completely different direction with the open-air openworld concept but I hope, it's not gonna be too similar to BotW and TotK again.