Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom (Mostly spoiler-free)

All other video games not related to the main farming series - Pokemon, Stardew Valley, My Time at Portia, and other indie-developed games.
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Mikodesu
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This is a mild spoiler, but... I figure it's a good warning. Open chests, search for chests, you could be missing something important. I found a key item in a random, out of the way chest in the sky. I have no idea how important it could be, though, and it could go either way, since key items go all the way from korok seeds to required magic powers. :|

Speaking of the sky, I need to remember to go back and buy crystallized charges ever so often, since there's such limited stock. I also need to remember to go back to the underground mines when I do, since I'd bet the mines repopulate every blood moon. Not sure how often shops do. Don't know how many battery charges I can be « Snuggly Bunny » to get.

As a side note, if Nintendo learned anything from Elden Ring, they learned the wrong thing. Mild spoiler for both games.
Spoiler:
Would you QUIT IT with the dragons?! They're neat a couple of times. I've already seen FIVE around the world. And I'd bet there are more. TotK dragons are even worse than Elden Ring ones, too, since you don't have to have special armor to fight them, you just « Snuggly Bunny » off when they're shooting fire or ice or whatever at you.
I did see something neat with the eastern style dragons today, possibly a big spoiler... while chasing a star fragment.
Spoiler:
A dragon came up from the depths. Not sure if that's a regular thing, if you can see them in the depths, or what.
Holy hell this is a huge game. :lol:

Edit: In a "the Nintendo Switch is a potato" complaint, I did get a clip of me hitting a point of the game having to load while I was on a mine cart rail. I thought the game was going to crash at first, but when I watched the clip back my fan was going the whole time, while there was a little loading wheel in the bottom corner. Love it.
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Kikki
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Personally, I doubt that Nintendo took anything from Elden Ring...imo they just do their own thing without much worrying about anybody else, both in a good way and in a bad way. Gleeoks are old-hat, from Nintendo. I assume it's the gleeoks you mean, since
Spoiler:
as far as the HUGE, Asian-styled Divine dragons from BotW go, there are only 4 of them...the 3 from before, and 1 new one we've been seeing since the trailers pre-release. Though it's a bit confusing since they look really different in the distance. I thought 'hey, a STONE dragon!' once, and went to take a picture of it...and the zoom lens informed me that I was taking a picture of Farosh. Not new at all, in that case. It really looked like it was made out of stone, though...pure grey in the distance.

They've been pushing that one new major dragon in our faces from pretty early on. They showed it constantly in start-up footage, it felt like Nintendo saying 'Hey, look, a new dragon! You like dragons, don't you? Don't you want to know more about this dragon??' Whereupon my brain sighs tiredly and informs Nintendo that I do not like dragons. They are lizards. Big ones, that kill you if you're not careful. I also don't like dinosaurs, which is basically what dragons are, in my eyes. No thanks. But Nintendo is QUITE sure I will like this dragon, because it keeps putting it in my face and insists I learn something about it. So I did.

I like this dragon. A lot. I decided to do a difficult thing that I don't want to do, because I want to go see the dragon again. It's why I'm currently struggling to upgrade my Depths armor to at least level 2, and just to get the set I had to find 6 Bargainers first, and now I need to fight big mini-bosses several times to get ingredients for upgrades, and it's a horrible chain of tasks I have to do, to make myself capable of this other boss-like thing, and I'll probably only get to see the dragon up close for a minute! But I must.
Darn it, Nintendo, you win again. But not on the gleeoks! I don't want anything to do with those rotters. I hate difficult boss battles. *grump* I'm currently putting stupid levels of effort into getting better armor to pad myself (literally?) to make up for my own terrible combat skills. I remember mentioning that I was worried the combat was going to be more difficult in this game because of the new mechanics. Well...I was right! They made everything more difficult. Not happy about that. I knew Ultrahand was going to be a headache for me, and Fuse means you have to fight a lot to get the best weapon bits. UGH. You don't gain any EXP from fighting so I just want to avoid it!

Really fun game, much better story than BotW so far (I'm saying this based on only ONE main story boss battle, but all of the geoglyphs, plus NPC dialogue and quests). I want to hurry up and become ultra powerful with maxed-out armor and hearts so I can just wreck all my enemies without having to feel stressed out about it. Currently the stress is still very much with me, though.

There's still so much to do. Even though I know a good chunk of the story now, I feel like I'm still very early on.
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Mikodesu
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Anymore Nintendo really doesn't do their own thing as much (with Zelda). BotW only exists because Aonuma took the time to play games outside his own purview - Skyrim, Witcher specifically - and study them. He mentioned more by name, I just can't remember what because it's been 6+ years. So I wouldn't be surprised if he either played Elden Ring or discussed the game with staff who had. BotW and as a result TotK are not the result of Nintendo going back to its roots (Zelda 1 had dungeons, for starters, and a lot of them), but Nintendo giving a « Cow Poopoo » about trends.

Honestly, Elden Ring is probably the same for From Soft. And now they have a 20 million unit selling hit. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I will agree the cutscenes have been significantly better this time around. Helps that dual audio has been ready since day 1, but I'd say they were better even if it hadn't been.
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Kikki
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Okay, so this is because I'm stupid, but JUST IN CASE anyone else didn't notice this, either...

You don't have to shoot your brightblooms. I mean, it does WORK better to shoot them because they're sent further out. But if you want to conserve your arrows, you can THROW them. (Not the arrows, lol...the item you would have attached to the arrow, like fire fruits or bright blooms.) I thought 'throwing' was just the 'hold' and then 'drop' or 'drop far' option, and it didn't work. But you can actually have Link give any item a hard chuck forward by holding down your right shoulder button as though to throw your weapon, and then hit the...I think the 'up' on the direction pad, to select what you want to throw rather than your weapon.

I'm probably the only one who didn't know it worked that way, so this may be a useless post, but I REALLY wish I'd known sooner. I wish so much I almost want to restart the game to save 300 arrows :? . I couldn't figure out why my sister was telling me to just throw the splashfruit, since when I tried it just fell uselessly to the ground and lay there, but actual THROWING is a different mechanic. I thought it applied only to weapons! Didn't notice the little print on the very bottom that tells you to select what you want to throw. Whenever I'm using that button, it tends to be when I'm in a desperate hurry to shoot a monster or something, so I never even saw that text at the bottom.
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Mikodesu
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I'm sure you're not alone, Kikki. There's a lot in this game that's not tutorialized very well, in spite of the handful of things that get multiple, we're going to stop the game and tell you what buttons to push tutorials. (I wonder if that's a Monolith Soft thing... since they had so much to do with the game... and if there's anything they're not good at, it's tutorials.)

(The most arrows I've found in the game in one spot have been in Kakariko, and I've started going back to the Fuse shrine for fire fruits... I run out of those a lot, too. It's like 16 in one place.)


One more I'd like to drop into the thread... if anyone hasn't come across it yet, there IS a recipe book in the game! You can only access it through the 'meals' tab. The tool tips on the side (under Link, iirc) that tell you what buttons to push to do things, will have one to see recipes. And if you either can't remember a recipe or want the game to grab ingredients for things for you, you can do it from there! :) Helpful to anyone who doesn't enjoy the experimentation of the cooking system.
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It's true they're not great at tutorials. Generally they either have none and leave you guessing how to do everything, or they throw twenty 3-page tutorials at you in a row and you can't remember a bit of it. Or in XC3, they don't just hold your hand, they hold BOTH your hands, tightly onto your controller, and push down on your fingers to make you press the right buttons, lol. (The tutorials in 3 were very forceful, even pointing arrows toward the button you're supposed to push and the menu item you're supposed to select and so on. All other options were greyed out and inaccessible, too.)

But I'm probably still in the hard-of-thinking minority.

On that note...sort of. Well, not really. But if you want to, you can now wear your Hylian hood with the hood DOWN, and Link's hair is in the customary BotW ponytail if his hood is down. (Which I love, since I hate his matted-looking Barbarian hair in TotK...what, the world got more civilized, and yet combs and brushes ceased to exist?) Just go see CeCe while wearing it after finishing her quest-line, and she'll suggest maybe you should wear the hood down/up...whichever is the reverse of what you currently have, giving you the opportunity to change it. (There's also another way to always have your hair in the tail, but it takes over any headgear, leaving you unable to wear a set, and eliminating a third of your defence, so that's kind of useless.)

Just in case anyone didn't already know.

EDIT: I have half of all lightroots mapped. This seems to be where my tendency to vigilantly avoid all monster interactions comes in handy. I've found it pretty easy to traverse.
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Mikodesu
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I can confirm, if anybody was curious, some BotW amiibo armor is in chests in TotK. Spoilers for what I found and where in the tag.
Spoiler:
The Fierce Diety head piece is in a cave in the "skull lake" area in Akala. Can't remember which eye, one leads to the chasm, the other leads to a cave. Small combat encounter, then go pick up the mask!
Had a pretty good time playing yesterday... Finished my first dungeon, which was a thing, and its boss, which was great! Not difficult, just very fun, which is all I could ask for. The "dungeon" was basically a waste of time, though. Hope the bosses are all that good!
Spoiler:
Rito area, for spoilers. Getting up to the arc was pretty cool, but the actual thing was worse than a divine beast imo. At least that had the novelty of manipulating major parts of a huge contraption. This was just a few simple puzzles, that once you figure out the gimmick are done in 5 minutes. Shame.

The boss might be stressful for people who hate diving and bow combat, but I love both, so it was great.
I was getting a little bored yesterday and got into my last "one more thing", and got the fancy new piece of clothing and it just reinvigorated me. Makes me think of "Fashion Souls" as they call it in the Souls community. It's just weirdly fun, playing how you want. And some of these costumes make Link look REALLY different.


I've been staggering out main quest stuff to have enough to get me through my play time, and I planned on tracking down another glyph yesterday because I see them all the time running around, and by the time I got to it I couldn't find them again. Funny how that happens.
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I'm not sure there's anything I can say without being mildly spoilery, but if you did the dungeon the game pushes you to do first, then things will probably look better later, though certainly they all work on the same basic principle. Dunno why that first dungeon is so builder's beige, but it was unbelievably boring, imo, and not at all suitable to the region, thematically. The others have much more interesting mechanics, though I've yet to try what I consider the 'fourth' dungeon. Though I think you can do them in any order, the game does seem to have an intended order, going by how hard they are and how useful the benefits. Plus the order in which the news starts talking about regional issues.
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Mikodesu
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Yep. I did go intended order for first dungeon. Didn't plan to, but...
Spoiler:
I found Rito Village first, before I even picked up the glider, so I felt obligated. :lol: Plus I was hoping the reward would be the best. Not as good as Revali's, but pretty good!
I've seen the aesthetic they used in mythology... I feel like Egyptian? So I liked it, the puzzles were just so non-existent I felt a little put out? Good to know things get at least a little better as you go! Definitely not the same as having dungeons back, but I'll take it. It's a good break from exploration, for sure.

The one bit of it I do really feel like is something Nintendo always wanted to do
Spoiler:
is have proper companions follow Link around. And I'm happy having them as long as they're invincible. It does give a bit more of the feel of characters HELPING. Which is nice.
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I just didn't feel it was suitable for the Rito. The other areas look very true to the region/people of the area, but I'd have wanted the Rito one to be
Spoiler:
all fabric and feathers and bright colours and maybe ties or beads or something. A fabric dungeon would be really unique! And why an ark? What about a huge boat is suitable for the Rito? I just felt disappointed in how un-Rito-like the place was when compared to the others. I would have wanted an enormous tree, perhaps, or something twiggy or branching...something else, I don't know what. Just not a huge stone boat. The Rito don't use stone at all! I guess the stone echoes the beigey stone of the region they live in, if not what they use themselves, but I wasn't satisfied with that dungeon at all, it felt too square and stony and unlike the Rito. Visuals are often more important to me than anything else. I'm not a puzzle person so I rarely judge anything on the quality of the puzzles, as I'm not qualified that way.

Basically I am liking the other areas because they are thematically appropriate, and because each one is more clearly...gimmicky? I feel like that's typical LoZ. You know, give the boy a new toy and make him use it over and over in that temple/dungeon/whatever. The Rito dungeon didn't feel like it showcased wind particularly well, either. To me, anyway. Though I do use the Baby Bird's ability constantly since getting it.
I'm currently clearing the dungeons but not completing them. Will leave boss battles for when I feel up to them. They really stress me out. I'm not fond of battle challenges with how slow my reaction time is. It takes me so long to even understand what I'm supposed to do...I always look up videos first to try to spare myself that stress of flailing around, unsure what the goal is. But once in battle, it always feels a lot different than watching a video.
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Kikki wrote: May 22, 2023 3:17 am I just didn't feel it was suitable for the Rito. The other areas look very true to the region/people of the area, but I'd have wanted the Rito one to be
Spoiler:
all fabric and feathers and bright colours and maybe ties or beads or something. A fabric dungeon would be really unique! And why an ark? What about a huge boat is suitable for the Rito? I just felt disappointed in how un-Rito-like the place was when compared to the others. I would have wanted an enormous tree, perhaps, or something twiggy or branching...something else, I don't know what. Just not a huge stone boat. The Rito don't use stone at all! I guess the stone echoes the beigey stone of the region they live in, if not what they use themselves, but I wasn't satisfied with that dungeon at all, it felt too square and stony and unlike the Rito. Visuals are often more important to me than anything else. I'm not a puzzle person so I rarely judge anything on the quality of the puzzles, as I'm not qualified that way.

Basically I am liking the other areas because they are thematically appropriate, and because each one is more clearly...gimmicky? I feel like that's typical LoZ. You know, give the boy a new toy and make him use it over and over in that temple/dungeon/whatever. The Rito dungeon didn't feel like it showcased wind particularly well, either. To me, anyway. Though I do use the Baby Bird's ability constantly since getting it.
Spoiler:
I think in terms of aesthetic, Nintendo thought so far as... it flies, they fly. Boom. Which is true, but...? I let more go with the Rito because they've been an anomaly since inception, a bird people who evolved from fish people when the world flooded? Grew wings and then decided to settle on a volcanic island?? They've never made sense. (Their aesthetic was originally very brown, too, though I liked their designs. I'd rather brown to neon, personally.)

The puzzles were very so-so in terms of engaging with the theme, you do fly around a bit, but the boss worked quite well at least. Since the only two ways of engaging it are both "Rito-style" combat. I managed the thing with rapid diving and lots of bullet time arrows, and I've since seen somebody else dive through the weak spots. At least that much fits - better than BotW for sure.

And to your dungeon crawling, I think it'll probably feel pretty good to come back later when you're powered up and clobber a few bosses. :) When you feel up to it, it'll be worth the wait!
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With the Rito themselves, I do prefer the ones that are more naturally coloured (not that there aren't some insanely brilliant birds out there, such as most tropical types, but I'm most used to ones that are black, brown, white, and grey. Canada's not known for its tropical birds.)...the white ones and black ones are always the best-looking among the Rito, imo. Brown, too...not so much the blue, pink or green ones. But I like their bright clothes...the earthy rainbow-striped weapons and so on, and bright decorative feathers (not the ones on their bodies, the ones they wear as accessories.) I'd have liked to see more of what the Rito do with design and colour in that dungeon. Bright earthy colours and lots of natural accessorizing like beads, strings, etc. Scraps of eye-catching this-and-that. (Kind of typical of actual birds.)

At least TotK has quite a few options for even the battle-avoidant. I cleared a certain area almost entirely with muddle buds...almost no hand-to-hand combat required. I made them kill each other so I didn't have to worry about groups of three enemies all targeting Link at once, which I'm just not slick enough to handle without getting whacked an awful lot and wasting valuable healing items. I still get all the loot they bash out of each other, so it's a great option for me.

It's just the unavoidable boss battles I have to stress myself out for, since they don't allow for sneakiness and the underhanded tactics necessary to give those with very slow reflexes a fighting chance. Currently working on getting more hearts (so I at least can't get one-shot) and getting all the armor, and as upgraded as I can. Plus farming a few good fuse items, since there's about 3 categories of enemy that I can handle (as long as I'm only facing 1 or 2 at once) that drop good parts.

Honestly, it's a great game; I love how many different types of things there are to do and ways to do it, and all the things you can collect and upgrade. I do wish reviews were a little more even-handed, though, and would mention the potential downsides of the various features and content, rather than just praising everything as unmitigated delight.
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I just finished the first recommended dungeon and it was not too bad, but I kind of liked the divine beasts in BOTW too. Maybe I was in the minority, I don't know. The benefit of finishing it is an awesome game-changer!

I also found all the the glyphs. Wow, that's a thing. Worth it story-wise.

Another blurb about the horses you can tame which I don't think is a spoiler, but it surprised me:
Spoiler:
besides the new special horses related to stable quests and whatnot, Gannon's horse is back too! Found him at Hateno beach, so now I have a white and a black giant horse.
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Mikodesu
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So...for starters, if you've been avoiding it, I suggest doing the poe sidequest. The rewards are well worth it.
Spoiler:
I'm saving for the Dark Link set, but the gloom minimizing stuff is well worth the work. Especially assuming the full set makes you invincible.
My other big share/discovery is related. I realized something that appears to be a big mechanical spoiler for the d***** (name: if you know, you know). Maybe avoid my spoiler tag for now and come back when you feel you've explored to the point that you're completing things.
Spoiler:
Shrines and the lightroot locations are 1:1 identical.

I'm all but positive. I dunno what made the thought pop into my head, but I checked a number of them, and all the ones I had both of matched up exactly, enough that I got curious, and marked a spot on the map to go look for a shrine. And lo and behold, there was a shrine quest there, and the shrine was exactly where the lightroot was in the depths.

Kind of neat from a story perspective, actually, since they're both written to 'push out the gloom', from Link or the world, and a great way to avoid so much searching for shrines with that horrible little pinging tracker... Smart game design, hell yeah.
I also started the Zora area quest...and so far, it's alright? Very early, character related whining. Also I guess spoilers if you haven't finished ANY dungeons.
Spoiler:
I could tell that Sidon was the sage from go, because he has voice lines. I'm sure it's a cost prohibitive thing, so I wish Nintendo had picked like...one to three languages to focus on and voiced more characters, because the amount of cutting in and out of voiced lines is super jarring. (It also felt like Sidon got less voiced lines than the Rito kid? Not really sure, just felt like it?)

And I already kinda hate neon green girl, too. She feels so...ham fisted. Neon green, wide faced, replacement Mipha...with a worse outfit. So, ugly Mipha. And the writing does nothing for her. Probably some part of the issue is the translation, because they go from "Go see this 'capable Zora'" (Not telling you I'm engaged btw. Totally normal to avoid telling my 'best friend' that.) To "Boy I'm super awkward around this girl, bud. I have NO idea why." To "MY LOVE!" in the space of 10 minutes??????

I think Nintendo flip-flopped, and all the writing budget went to Zelda this time... :shock: Which I'm very glad her section is so much better, but everything else is just...bad by comparison.
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Ahh, don't know if you want to know, so I'll spoiler it. About the somehwat Zant-ish armor set, full and upgraded...
Spoiler:
Having the full set doesn't make you invincible to gloom...though it is a BIG help. What each piece does is give you one...well, I think of them as 'heart protectors'. So if you have the full set, you have three protective hearts. The gloom 'breaks' your hearts each second you spend in it, so you have several seconds of walking through gloom 'free', as the armor absorbs that and those hearts break in place of your actual health. Then as soon as you are out of the gloom, they repair...unlike your real hearts, which will only repair if you get to a lightroot or go to the surface. (Link in the depths is me in winter versus me in summer, lol. I, too, have my heart dramatically healed by sunshine.)

My set is upgraded only once, since I'll have to fight 9 freaking froxes to upgrade it to level 2 to get the bonus, but knowing it'd be such a pain to upgrade, I decided to look up what you get out of it other than higher defence, but the set bonus at the second fairy upgrade doesn't appear to make you invincible to gloom, either. It simply gives you a fourth protective heart, and since they heal as soon as you get out of the gloom, they really are very useful and let you walk through all but the biggest patches of the stuff without worrying.

Basically the set makes it so you can be significantly less wary of gloom and gloom-ridden monsters, but it nowhere near makes you invincible, unfortunately. I was hoping that, too, and if it had, I'd have gone to the bother of killing all those froxes for it. But for a fourth protective heart, each of which lasts one second of gloom-walking? Nah. Though froxes are easier than taluses, so there's that, at least.

Overall, I've found the Miner's set more useful to exploring the depths than the Depths set, although the Depths set is strangely adorable and the Miner's set is strangely disturbing, like a glowing lightbulb clown + S/M kink + plague doctor. Put it all together, and you're not sure just what kind of kink Link is running. I also have the Dark Link set, but it can't be upgraded (ARGH) so the defence is terrible, and I don't like sets that make Link look like other games' versions of him, it looks so jarring in this game world and I prefer he just looks like this world's version of himself, so I'll probably never use it...it only has the same bonus as the Sheikah set anyway, which you can upgrade and thus has much better defence. Oh, I mean the 'stealth' set. WHY DID THEY RENAME IT?? Why does the existence of the Zonai mean the devs had to try to erase the Sheikah's contributions to the world? Bad world-building, Nintendo!

As of yesterday, I have over 2/3 of the depths mapped...84 lightroots of 120. My tendency to: 1) climb everything 2) glide as much as possible rather than walk and 3) avoid all battles, works really well down there. Not for gathering stuff (other than zonaite from the un-abandoned mines, where there are no enemies anyway) but it's great for finding lightroots!
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