I HATE TEARS OF THE KINGDOM

3 hours of listening to Fiona from adventure time complain about tears of the kingdom. I love it

I knew the editing in the video was top tier but I was sold when I looked in the bottom left and saw the background tracks being listed as they start playing jeez you went ALL OUT for this

The fact that this started with them wanting to make a love letter to BOTW and ended with them making a three hours hate letter to TOTK is kinda poetic

This video could net you more than 70 dollars in ad revenue, so in a way you got your money back!

One of the very first NPC's you meet at Lookout Landing tells you that they're taking refuge there after their home was destroyed when Lurelin Village was raided by pirates. When I first heard that, I was SO intrigued to see theses new pirate enemies and headed straight for Lurelin. I get there and find out the "pirates" were just Bokoblins. Not even special, unique Bokoblins that wear pirate outfits or anything. Literally the exact same Bokoblins you can find everywhere else.

The new mechanics in TotK are SO innovative and SO fun. Then your funky new weapon breaks after what feels like maybe 20 swings. And then your cool weird plane starts flashing and disintegrates in mid-air. And then you literally have to work in a mine to save credits so you can autobuild. And then you find a cool trick to duplicate zonaite so you can stop mining and just have fun, but then the fun police (Nintendo) forces a patch on you and removes the trick. And you start thinking about how you paid $70 for a DLC with the same lifeless landscape, and Paper Mario: Origami King has better fucking actual dungeons.

i still cannot believe this game introduced itself to the public with this dark and cool ass trailer and then proceeded to do absolutely nothing with that idea and give us a worse story than botw that makes no sense to be conveyed in the way it was in the previous game and for the game itself to be exactly the same in almost every way they kept the title secret, the game took 6 years to come out, and was 70 dollars

Fun Fact: TOTK doesn't use the same engine as BOTW. Its actually a new engine that simply ported over existing assets. The new engine is used in a few other games too but TOTK does not reuse the BOTW engine contrary to popular belief

I cant emphasize how cute representing your mom as a Delcatty is

God the Sage speeches thing was such a mood. The way they repeat it almost entirely word for word. I had been initially excited for the Gerudo Ancestor because ya know... the fact that Ganondorf is... ya know... Gerudo... the King of the Gerudo. There was even Gerudo WITH Ganondorf in one of the Zelda Memories AND YET- All we get is one SINGULAR throwaway line about Ganondorf being King of the Gerudo- a fact she REFUSES to elaborate on. And that's it. It feels like it would have been such an easy thing to give them like... even just a PARAGRAPH 3-5 sentences to give us any information about the culture, the environment ANYTHING about the Ancient World and yet that was still too much worldbuilding for them apparently

Going through the whole hebra sky island ascension, skydiving into the cloud, seeing “Wind Temple”, followed by “Wind Temple 1F”, but then hearing “there are still five locks securing the hatch on the deck” followed by seeing them pop up on the map is probably my most disappointing video game experience ever.

Purah being a sage never even crossed my mind but now i realize just how much better that would be then just reusing mineru

Ngl. I didn't like tears very early on. Everyone called me crazy. I'm just glad I'm not alone anymore

secret stone??????? demon king!!!!?!?!?!???????

Another weird piece of environmental storytelling that goes completely unexplained and unacknowledged is that the big sky rocks that dot Hyrule's surface are literally terraforming the land around them. I think it's supposed to be soil falling with the rocks, but it just looks like the ground is turning into the same kind of soil as is on the sky island.

Fun fact: in the Japanese version of the game, Ganondorf is actually a bit more explicit about what happened to the Zonai civilization. He uses the term "horobu", which roughly translates to "to perish" or "to be annihilated" (the character 滅 means "destruction"), and even offers his condolences. This pretty much confirms that the Zonai went extinct, and even implies that they were killed en masse in some sort of cataclysmic event, which makes it all the more frustrating that the English translation left it ambiguous. FANTASTIC video essay, by the way. I thought something was wrong with me because I wanted to stop playing only 50 hours into TotK, and you nailed pretty much everything that bothered me about it. I'm really glad to know that I'm not alone in this. Ah well...all I can hope for now is that Echoes of Wisdom will be able to bridge the gap between traditional and modern Zelda and give the wise Princess of Hyrule the solo game she deserves. :)

There is some beautiful irony in the way the BOTW formula stagnated much, much faster than OoT's, only taking them one game for the dev team to stagnate and fall into complacency. Mind you, the formula can still be improved and refined, but after TOTK, the chances are looking dire.

As a color blind person I thought that gloom and malice were the same thing, and that they had people make different for no apparent reason

Me at like 10:00 pm: “yeah let’s find something to fall asleep to.” Me at 1:28 AM, completely engrossed in this critique: “mmm I didn’t fall asleep but that was awesome.” I agree with so much of what you’re saying and even in your ‘nitpicking or biases’ (which I’m glad you use to INFORM your opinion making rather than trying to create some ‘objective’ distance), you demonstrate an internal consistency to YOUR voice and your passion for the Zelda series as a whole, especially the modern Zelda format, shines through so brightly. Great video. I will be sleep deprived tomorrow but it was totally worth it and dropping a subscription.

This is the most thorough dismantling I’ve ever seen of this game. Thanks for putting my feelings into writing