It's not even a bad game as such, but fuck Nintendo and fuck whoever produced and directed it. It's not just lazy, it literally pushes back games as an art form.

Yeah, some parts of it are cool and/or innovative (the dungeons are great), but the main questline overall and especially at the end is pathetic in the way that it leans on set pieces and cinematography as a crutch in a game that is supposedly centered on freedom.

Remember like a decade ago when every single fucking game that was "good" was one that just pretended to be a movie that you push buttons to advance, and that produced a swamp of QTE bullshit and games that only exist for the cutscenes? That trend had clearly been receding in recent years even though Last of Us (the main example of that trend) is still quite popular.

But Nintendo found just the way to revive it! "Hmm, games that pretend to be kino are old-hat, so what do we do to market to masses that we treat like slack-jawed yokels to impress as many of them as possible? I know! Instead of pretending to be kino, let's pretend to be Infinity War!"

It's the same shit! It's just a fucking Marvel formula transplanted to Breath of the Wild's setting, with vapid not-even-scavenger-hunts to watch cutscene after cutscene where cool things happen that are completely disconnected from player input.

Everyone knows that the beast ganon fight in BotW was dogshit. You know the dragon fight at the end of TotK? Literally the same thing! You get on a fucking mount and zoom around the big scary monster that doesn't actually do anything, strike the big glowing weak points along its body, and then stab it in the fucking forehead and it's done. But now, because it has some Avengers-ass "Oh, I recognize the thing!" direction with Dragon Zelda suddenly becoming [almost] an actual participant in the plot and Dragon Ganon shooting a billion fireballs that aren't even fucking aimed at you while you fly circles around him, now it's cool? Or because the fucking Force Ghosts pop in and contradict the rules about the dragon transformation being permanent so that Link can get his waifu as a prize for fighting the monster, but she has some voice lines so it's egalitarian!

And don't get me started on having the bosses come back along with the Sages ("It's just like Infinity War!") to just fucking negate each other offscreen. Absolute horseshit that makes the Divine Beast business at the end of BotW look elegant by comparison.

Fuck these fucking hack writers and their pandering bullshit that we will now get a thousand other games imitating. We're just going to get compounding dark ages of writing as paradigm after paradigm is added to make it worse and worse as these shitheads optimize the formula for selling both to credulous 13-year-olds and otaku 35-year-olds. I hate it.

7/10

  • UlyssesT [he/him]
    ·
    1 year ago

    I feel obligated to point out that both BotW and even more so TotK have the main plot center around assembling a Knights of the Round, though it gets played too much like the Avengers, as I already whinged about.

    That isn't bad on its own, but it is definitely not a recurring thing in the series besides that two-off doing it, and the sages really don't have the same kind of persistence in the franchise the way the redundantly recurring trio of Link, Zelda, and Ganon(dorf) do. Thus, you comparing Zelda as a franchise directly to Arthurian legend just doesn't hold up.

    Incidentally, I regret to inform you

    I was tempted to stop reading right there because I really, really don't like :reddit-logo: tier smarmy sorry-not-sorry delivery systems. :blob-stop:

    a self-sucking abomination of Deep Lore and cinematography now

    I'm not so sure, outside of a possible long in the tooth preoccupation with "the player isn't cool enough to participate in this E P I C moment outside of a QTE" moments. That shit was getting old since WoW's Wrath of the Lich King decided that the raid simply wasn't E P I C enough to defeat Arthas on its own and needed some plot armored douchebag to actually defeat Arthas instead.

    Zelda and especially games in general are probably going to get much worse because of the success of the “movie game but the movie is Infinity War” formula of TotK. I think this is a false dilemma, not unlike the "your choices are unscratched liberalism and scratched fascism" false dilemma that media typically pushes on its consumers, the kind that says "things are bad, sure, but the guy trying to improve society somewhat :improve-society: just kicked a puppy therefore he went too far and everything he said and tried to do is now invalid :very-intelligent:

    A non-shitty Faces of Evil/Wand of Gamelon approach to the Zelda franchise could conceivably be quite refreshing, allowing Hyrule to exist without being blown up/flooded/reset/whatever for a while, building it up without tearing it down, and maybe even having other lands for Link (or goddesses forbid, some other protagonist) to explore and adventure in. I know it probably won't happen, but it'd beat the tiresome dichotomy of "reset everything in the plot back to T H E P R O P H E C Y from the 90s at least once every 2 games" or "present the franchise as a pretentious MCU style escalating stakes momentum machine until it derails."

    • GarbageShoot [he/him]
      ·
      1 year ago

      That isn’t bad on its own, but it is definitely not a recurring thing in the series besides that two-off doing it, and the sages really don’t have the same kind of persistence in the franchise the way the redundantly recurring trio of Link, Zelda, and Ganon(dorf) do. Thus, you comparing Zelda as a franchise directly to Arthurian legend just doesn’t hold up.

      This is limited by my lack of familiarity with the franchise but, while TotK is absolutely the clearest expression of it, followed by BotW, there are definitely analogues elsewhere. Particularly, it's a theme in Zelda to get assistance from a collection of great beings (yes, I think it was the Triforce goddesses in, uh, Skyward Sword?) but in Majora's Mask with the Giants and Twilight Princess with the glowing orb animals, the bulk of the actual playtime is centered on getting your gods/Great Men on the same page so that they can somehow make the malice vulnerable to your attack. There's a direct connection between this and the circle of almost-peers in TotK, and you can see that in the very direct bridge that the Divine Beast bullshit in BotW creates between these two characterizations. It's just that one is more difficult than the other, but it's now worth it due to the Avengers formula.

      Speaking of, I have no idea how the last thing you are saying is a response to me. I'm talking about market forces, not fan fiction.

      • UlyssesT [he/him]
        ·
        1 year ago

        I’m talking about market forces

        "It sells, therefore it is justified" style "market forces" rhetoric could be said about gacha/lootbox/battlepass monetization schemes in contemporary video games, and can also apply to other things from cryptogrifts to MLMs to DuPont microplastics and Monsanto poisons. :debord-tired:

        • GarbageShoot [he/him]
          ·
          1 year ago

          My point is literally that it sucks that the market is going to emulate it. Also you're on a fucking communist board, anyone who puts forward the argument you imagined I made would be liable to be banned.

          • UlyssesT [he/him]
            ·
            1 year ago

            Your argument about what you meant by "market forces" and what the implications of those was unclear, so of course I'm going to "imagine" it.

            More than a few times, on this site, I've been told (shitty propaganda thing) is actually harmless or even leftist because it entertains the person defending it and I'm glad you weren't going there, even if it was vague and this comment thread has probably reached the end of its usefulness.

            • GarbageShoot [he/him]
              ·
              1 year ago

              The bigger point of the OP, which I state multiple times therein, is that people are going to imitate TotK's hack games-as-marvel-movies directing.