LogFAQs > #973974318

I beat Tears of the Kingdom! That finale was incredible, even if those bosses were easy. So some thoughts on the game:
Combat is even more fun than it was in BotW. Sure it's the same weapon types, but fuse gives you so many more options to mess around with, mostly with putting different devices and objects on your shield for movement. Next time you raid a monster mining camp in the Depths, put a bunch of bombs on your shields, and go wild with bomb jumping. Also fusing monster parts to your weapons makes them way stronger and more durable. I'll be honest, I never minded weapons breaking in this game, since I was changing it up so often. My only wish is there were more enemy types. Yes there is more variety than in BotW, but it's still not enough. The new minibosses are fun to fight though. Flux Constructs are neat because they're designed around all of your main abilities. You can fight every Flux Construct in the game, and have completely different experiences with every single one. Froxes are terrifying to fight, but if you can shoot its eye and get into a good rhythm of keeping it stunned, it aint no thing. Gleeoks are just plain cool, though easier to take down than I'd like. Frost Gleeoks in particular are neat because you can climb onto the icicles it drops and recall them to get some airtime. Wish there were like 1 or 2 more miniboss types though for more variety.
Story. Okay I'll be honest, the story I think is good. It's just told poorly. Watching the geoglyph memories, even doing them in the correct order, it felt like a lot of scenes were missing from the story. They get the point across, but I wish there was more to it, and that it was more seamlessly woven into the adventure as you complete major objectives. There is also a major theme of sacrifice throughout the story, but I feel that it has poor payoff in the end, especially for Zelda, turning back into a human and forgetting what it was like to be a dragon. Just kind of makes the whole thing pointless for her character? Idk. I think she should have either not been returned to human, or if she has to forget, she should forget Link. But also that final boss fight, where Ganondorf turns into a dragon, and you ride noodle Zelda high above Hyrule. One, it's epic as all fuck, but also, the symbolism all throughout the marketing and trailers and the logo of 2 dragons chasing each other is what came to mind during this fight. Nintendo knew what they were doing.
Exploration: They did what I expected them to do when they announced all those years ago that they were using the same world map and made it feel unrecognizable. It helps that you start in Hyrule Field and go to the Castle early on, which are places in BotW you didn't want to go to until you were stronger/more skillful. So a lot of the early hours of the game feel like you're in places you've never seen, because often times you were chased by Guadians in these places, so you probably didn't take long to look at the scenery. And they put new things to do all over the place. New quests, new shrines and puzzles, Addison, caves, new enemies, new minigames, etc etc. The map is VERY dense with content, even more so than I was expecting. Just roaming around doing things in this game is fun, especially with the new abilities. Ultrahand is incredible, and the amount of different devices and objects they made to utilize it is way more than I was expecting. You can build some crazy contraptions in this game. The two fan hoverbike kind of breaks exploration, but that's the beauty of this kind of system is putting things together to see what you can do. And I use ascend all the time. While exploring out in the world, in shrines, even in combat. There are enemy encounters that were designed with ascend in mind, it's incredible. And the shrine puzzles are much more enjoyable this time around. There are some shrines in this game that I don't know what kind of black magic Nintendo is performing under the hood to make this run, and on the Switch of all hardware, but it's far beyond what anyone else is doing in terms of physics engine capabilities it's unbelievable. How is the Switch not melting while running this game I will never know.
But that's not all, there are two entire other plains of existence besides Hyrule. I was hoping there would be caves in this game. I didn't know there was going to be an entire massive cavern that spans the entirety of Hyrule. The depths are spooky, with scary armored Lynels, and Froxes, and gloomed monsters all over the place, and tons and tons of treasure to find. I just wish that there was more variety to the environments. Everything is grey, with the same trees and rocks everywhere. I remember going to Akkala early on and going into the depths and looking out and seeing massive lavafalls in the distance and realizing I was seeing the underside of Death Mountain. It filled my mind with possibilities of what could be under the desert or Hebra, or the jungle, and was disappointed when I want to those places and the scenery looked the same as anywhere else. That's my one big gripe with the Depths. Essentially though, I like to think of the Depths as the Dark World of this game, and I'm glad they managed to shove that kind of content in here.
The sky islands though, not as great as I was expecting. Lots and LOTS of copy and pasted islands here. There are some islands/archipelagos that are entirely unique, and have things that you won't see anywhere else in the game. There are fun, cool things to do up there. Just wish there was more of that. It is incredible leaping from a high sky island and diving down to the surface, or down into the depths and it's entirely seamless. They even thought to show you the curvature of the earth while you're so high up, it's a really nice touch.
And finally the dungeon content. Okay some of he theming of the dungeons is down right incredible. The Wind and Fire Temples come to mind. The stories surrounding the dungeons are just blegh to me except for the Gerudo story. The Rito are cold. The Gorons got addicted to crack rocks. The water is too gross for the Zora. Big whoop. :| The Gerudo are literally fighting off zombie hordes in the midst of a giant sandstorm. That's awesome. I do think the puzzles are generally better designed than most of the dungeons from BotW. It's just they're still overall not where they should be. I know that BotW/TotK are all about freedom and creativity. So why don't the dungeons feel more creative? The worst is the water dungeon. Wow is it bad. It's so short and the puzzles are so simple, and it's not fun or interesting to explore this dungeon. What happened? Then the Gerudo dungeon conversely almost feels like something you'd see in OoT, and the puzzles all use light and mirrors, which is good. The Construct Factory is great. The puzzles are real tests of your reasoning skills and knowledge of your abilities and how the physics engine works. Too bad the section after the Construct Factory when you ride Robo-Mineru to the Spirit Temple and fight the boss there is so blegh. Robo-Min is a cool idea on paper, but in practice she's so slow and weak and just gets in your way. And the boss Spirit Temple boss is too easy.
But GameFAQs is warning me my post is getting too long, so I'll leave it at this. I loved this game. I've put 125 hours into it and don't want to stop playing. I want to 100% complete this game. I want to keep building weird crazy contraptions. I hope they are taking the criticisms of the lack of enemy variety, and the poor dungeons and champion abilities(yeah did I mention the champion abilities? they're garbage except for the Wind one, and using them is annoying as all fuck) to heart and they can make the next Zelda game a perfect video game. Because other than those problems, they're already there.