 Hey everyone and welcome to Review Crew. Today is our first review and it is for none other than The Legend of Zelda, Tears of the Kingdom, which released exclusively on Nintendo Switch this past May 12th, 2023. It's the biggest game of the year so far and probably is going to be one of the top games in many people's game of the year conversations but we are here today to review the game. I am joined by Roger from Rogers Base and Nate from Nintendo Prime. Before we get into the review itself, we are going to talk a little bit about some familiarity with the overall franchise of Zelda and or some basic thoughts on Tears of the Kingdom. Roger, tell us something about the game and or your background with Zelda first. Sure. I mean in terms of my background with Zelda, the first one I ever played was actually Majora's Mask. So I brought up on one of the intro videos that we did a while ago. I was just going to mention that about your shirt. Your shirt is so one of my first systems ever was the N64 and I got it in 98 but I didn't get Ocarina of Time the year it came out. I got Banjo-Kazooie and then I saw all the hype in the lead up to Majora's Mask's release in Nintendo Power because as any good kid growing up in the 90s I was subscribed to Nintendo Power. I read every chapter. I was like this game looks incredible. I want to check it out and that actually is the game that got me into the Zelda franchise. So then I went back and played Ocarina of Time and then over the course of the past 20 years I've gone back and played all the mainline Zelda games other than the Oracle games which has just been dropped on NSO. So it gives me a good excuse to go check those out. In terms of my favorite Zelda prior to this game I would say would have probably been Wind Waker. I also was a huge fan of Breath of the Wild but I feel like Wind Waker, I've always been a fan of the sea aesthetic and boats and just the art style in general in that game was gorgeous and timeless. So big fan of Wind Waker. And you know general overall thoughts on Tears of the Kingdom so far even if I didn't already just spoil it right there. What I was talking about with my history with the series man I absolutely love it. I think this very well might be my favorite 3D Zelda in the history of the franchise. And again that's saying a lot with how much I absolutely adore Wind Waker and Breath of the Wild. Those two games like in the lead up to Tears of the Kingdom I would say are like perfect 10 out of 10s for me. I absolutely adore them. I can go back and replay them. I did even go back and replay Breath of the Wild Master Mode in between my playthrough of Tears of the Kingdom just because I didn't want to like spoil story stuff off stream for myself. I wanted to be able to stream the whole game. So yeah I went back and I played it and I loved it but I really do feel like Tears of the Kingdom does so much right with the story with the visuals with the gameplay mechanics everything that it's gone on to become not just probably my favorite 3D Zelda but one of my favorite video games of all time. Very cool. And Nate, some Zelda talk. Oh man I could just go on and on for hours. Look I've been doing the Zelda thing for a long time. I started when I with Link's Awakening that was the very first game I played back on Gameboy. It wasn't even mine. There's a whole weird story about bullying back in the day. I was not being a very kind kid at the time on how I got to play Link's Awakening but I made up for it the next day but it doesn't really matter. Point is that's my first Zelda game that I ever played and bullying's bad. Don't do it. And then as I got a little older it was really renting Ocarina of Time from Best Buy and then somehow I just kept renting it. It probably would have been cheaper at some point just to buy it but you know whatever I couldn't afford to ever buy it. My allowance only allowed me to rent games. It took me two years to beat that game but the funny thing is that game is what inspired me to start up doing fan websites that ultimately led to Zelda Domain and then Zelda Informer. I did work at the Zelda Dungeon and Universe as well and did that for a long time. So I have been intricately covering theorizing Zelda stuff for a hell of a long time until Zelda Informer basically shut down in 2017 and that's when I started doing the YouTube stuff. And I just love this franchise. It's my favorite franchise. It's really weird. Every time a major game in the series comes out it's always at like this critical injunction in my life that something's happening and it just helps me sort of emotionally get through it which is I don't know if other people attach that to video games but sometimes you just need that something whether it's a distraction whether it's even just something in the story that just man that really resonates with what I'm going through. And so Zelda's just sort of always been that constant that I can always turn to and Tears of the Kingdom and look before Tears of the Kingdom my favorite Zelda game of all time was Breath of the Wild. So you can kind of get an idea of probably where Tears of the Kingdom is sitting for me at the moment. But the weird thing is for Breath of the Wild my favorite Zelda was actually Zelda 2 and I might be the only person in the world that had that as their favorite game for decades. So and just yeah and that's favorite Zelda game. It wasn't Zelda 2 wasn't out there in my favorite games of all time. It was I think it was like in the my top 15 at one point but Breath of the Wild shot all the way up to the very top of all games. So like there's a pretty big gap I feel between my one and two and number three but it's Man Tears of the Kingdom. If you can't tell I'm probably going to give it a pretty positive review but I'm also hyper critical on a lot of things and I don't believe any games of 10 out of 10. So we'll see what happens. Pretty positive to as far as my familiarity background with the Legend of Zelda series. I began playing the first Legend of Zelda game on NES but I wouldn't call myself a fan at the height as I was until Ocarina of Time came out in 1998. I played Zelda played Zelda 2. I played Link to the Past which was great and each game kind of progressively got better and better in my opinion but that lead up between a Link to the Past and Ocarina of Time was like nothing I ever experienced like Roger reading Nintendo Powers and reading Electronic Gaming Monthlies which is one of the inspirations by the way for this very review crew that we're doing today. All of the pictures you have to rewind back to that era. We didn't have websites and YouTube and this bombardment constantly from Nintendo or other people to check out online and see daily drops of things. It was pictures and the pictures just looked so good. That was one of the integral things of the Nintendo 64 was re-envisioning our beloved 2D games in 3D and when you saw these early glimpses like that's what this next gen hardware could do. It was mind blowing. You take a look at any of those games that came out from Star Fox to Star Fox 64 total night and day. The best that it got was Super Mario World 2 Yoshi's Island or Super Mario RPG and then Super Mario 64 just how much more it could do. Now the Legend of Zelda Ocarina of Time which by the way for the longest time I said Ocarina of Time. I kind of go back and forth between the two. Ocarina was natural but then I hear that it's actually called an Ocarina for the instrument so that game said it for me and I remember I became like fascinated in Zelda when there was actually a Star Fox 64 VHS tape that Nintendo gave Nintendo more in June of 97 and at the end it was like wait there's more and it had this beautiful seven seconds of Ocarina of Time footage of Link and like opening this treasure chest and all that. So that just made me a fan for life, played all of the games, went to E3, got some awesome early footage of the Twilight Princess booth that a lot of people didn't get. I just wish I had more of it but that's on my YouTube channel. My daughter's middle name is Zelda so that tells you that I kind of like Zelda a lot. It's one of my three overall favorite franchises kind of tied in there with Super Mario and Street Fighter. So yeah, just love Zelda. Ocarina of Time actually stayed my favorite overall game of all time from 98 to like 2018. 2017 Breath of the Wild came out and it was the first time that something took over that I was like, does this deserve the new number one spot? Maybe, but I went back and forth and you know, you tie it in part of it to your youth, part of it to a younger, more impressionable age. I was 15 at the time. The revolutionary of the controller, the rumble pack, all this kind of stuff. And then did it give me that again? Yeah, it kind of did. So, you know, probably within a year, finally by by 2018, that's when I decided, yeah, it's been dethroned. And that was like a kind of a weird feeling to admit to myself, it did enough for me. So anyways, what do I think on Tears of the Kingdom? You'll find out soon, but very much for the Legend of Zelda Tears of the Kingdom as well. But up until at least now, Breath of the Wild officially became my new favorite game of all time from for many reasons. But that's my background, it's good. You did forget one aspect of how we got to consume things way back when. So yeah, a lot of still images, magazines, some of those magazines came with a demo disc that included trailers. And you did get to see some trailers on a PC if you were lucky enough back in the day to have a PC to put it in. Yeah, that's one of the big things I used to love from EGM. I get that disk every time and I'm like, oh, what trailer am I going to get to finally see that probably released six months ago? See, so much of my stuff was literally out of like the power charts and the power pack preview thing that was in the old Nintendo powers. But then they would link is at the time again, I was growing up, you know, 1998, 1999, websites were beginning kind of to take off. And so it'd be like, find out more on Nintendo.com. So I would rush to the library because we only had dial up internet at home and I would like type in Nintendo.com and look at the four or five screenshots of stuff that were available. And I still have like vivid memories of, you know, going back and seeing like shows on this Malay at E3 2001 and and seeing like the screenshots of that game. It was yeah, really and actually to go to something you mentioned earlier, Nate to talking about like, Oh, I don't really know if necessarily video games hit the same way in people's lives as like milestones. Dude, that is me and the Smash Brothers franchise for me and Smash Brothers like the first game came out. I was in grade school. The second game came out. I was in middle school. The third game came out. I was in high school. Fourth game came out. I just left college and fifth game came out and I was living here working full time in LA. So it's like every single Smash is hit with a different era of my life. So I'm right there with you with the Zelda franchise. I totally understand that feeling. Well, yeah. And 64 entering high school, GameCube first semester at university. We just graduated from university. There you go. The first system that I would play with my soon to be wife, like which came out March 3rd. My daughter was born March 17. That's great. Absolutely. And you I think that's one of the things that's powerful about video games is that, you know, you can relate music to life. You can relate a smell to a certain life childhood, a certain wooden box or something like that food. But video games, you're playing, you're seeing, you're hearing, you're in control. There's so much conversation around it. Like this conversation here we'll probably remember in 10 years like you remember when tears of the kingdom came out and we had this hour long discussion like that was hype. That's just why it's become my favorite medium and and a little bit on Majora's Mask or yeah, Majora's Mask. That was that my first E3 like back then. Wow, so wow, man, 1000. The game would come out in five more months in the United States that October. That's how far back that was. And I played, it was the big things that year were Majora's Mask, Conker's Bad Fur Day and Perfume Star. Love Conker's Bad Fur Day had its own section. So here I was. Yes, this is a great E3. I'm already. Yeah, I'm so jealous. Sega was still there. It was Nintendo PlayStation. Wow. And I would have gone in 1999. Actually, that was my first one that I got invited to based off of the previous conversation we'd had like with Konami and stuff like that. But something else happened that I just didn't go to for other reasons. But here I was at Nintendo's booth and like, are you 18? Like I'm 16 for Conker's Bad Fur Day. It's like, well, if you got trusted to be in here, you could go and so I was like, oh man, my first E3 was a true E3. But the German Mask, yeah, that went on to being really awesome game. Let's let's get into the review. Hopefully you enjoyed our backstory. I guess we can talk with I mean, even though I don't know about you, all of you, let me rewind a little bit. Our review is on a 100 point scale. So we'll give stuff out of 10. Those could be 6.3s and 9.2s. That's how we're going to work. Okay, then we'll average everything out and see what does Review Crews overall score of this game become. But just let you know, five is mediocre. Five is it in a grade level of school like F bad. 10 is absolutely fantastic. This is immaculate, perfect. One of the favorite things you've ever experienced. Zero, absolute garbage doesn't even work track. And then you go from like excellent, horrible and great to subpar to mediocre and good and like so that's how we're going to be addressing this to you. Okay, so that's the rewind. That's what our scale is. And then now going back to the review. I think a good place to start off with is graphics. Because, you know, different people place graphics at different levels of importance. I think it's definitely important, but maybe not as much as gameplay, but graphics are, they're what you see first. And if you are fortunate enough to be healthy and have vision to see is probably the most powerful sense that you see everywhere. So I think it's a fair place to begin a review with graphics. It's kind of like when you meet someone for the first time, right? Friendship or dating wise or anything, you see them first, correct? Before you get to know the gameplay and the sound control design, whatever, right? But let's begin their visuals. Roger, what do you think of this overall games, graphics and then Nate, you could chime in all chime in. So this could be unlike that former section where we're in specific modes. Roger kick it off, but then we could kind of just bounce around. Yeah. Okay. And I could keep this one really short and sweet because I feel like you know, I've always loved the aesthetic of the Breath of the Wild games. I just think they look so pretty and kind of have that timeless factor the same way that Wind Waker does not quite to Wind Waker's level, but again closer than something like maybe Twilight Princess, which hasn't necessarily aged as well, or something like Ocarina of Time again, another perfect example. But no visually, I think this one's great. I think the color palette in this one is also really interesting like within the first maybe our two hours of the game when you're on the Sky Island and everything's kind of those autumn orangey kind of colors. I was really surprised at first, especially compared to how Breath of the Wild looked where I'm like, is the whole game gonna look like this? Is this gonna be what I'm expecting for the majority of my gameplay in Tears of the Kingdom? But then obviously as you go through it, you get to the different dungeons, you get to the underground areas, the lighting effects. I just think overall it's a really beautiful game. One of the prettiest looking things on the Switch. But I think, and I guess this kind of goes along with the graphics talk as well. I think the character design in this one is also fantastic. I love all the designs of the constructs. I think the bosses are really cool. The look of the temples in this one as well really stands out like I was somebody that liked the Divine Beasts in Breath of the Wild, but also somebody that thought they the outside of the Divine Beasts I think looked a little too generic like they all kind of looked a little samey. Whereas you get to the fire temple in this one and it's in the depths and there's heat going all over the place with these beautiful little particle effects. You've got the water temple in the sky with the Splatoon sludge flying out of it. And as you progress your way through the game, especially by the time you get to the ending, it's just like one other little visual feast after another. So I feel like overall this is one of Nintendo's prettiest games they've ever made. And yeah, I'm a huge fan of the graphics. Yeah, from an art perspective, I think they nailed it. That was one of the things that I was always looking forward to most in the Legend of Zelda games and any kind of game really because you know, I've played plenty of action adventure titles is I want to see the cool fireplace. I want to see the cool ice place. I used to look at the magazines. Oh, when are we going to get to the water? I don't want to be spoiled. And this game, even though it's based off of Breath of the Wild's overall world, everything still looked really pretty. And then where Nintendo doesn't necessarily shine in this game in terms of, OK, it's not doing what the competition is doing on that 4K resolution clarity perspective or sheer raw polygon power perspective or textures. It's the art that is terrific. You're looking at all of the different outfits that Link has. I think his polygon model is fine. I think it blends well with the art style like you were saying, maybe not quite like Wind Waker, where Wind Waker was so simple yet elegant that it's sort of timeless like an old school cartoon. I think Breath of the Wild still looks good for being six years old for that matter, you know. But we'll see how well this lasts in, you know, 20 years like Wind Waker did. But here's the Kingdom really good fire effects. You mentioned the good thing regarding the beast, the divine beasts before. Everything was tan. You entered into it and it was just tan. The boss battles too of the different Phantom Ganon incarnations, all similar. Cool, nice animation design, but kind of samey. Here everything was this visual different treat and we had more to look at. We had lasers that popped off. Those lasers created new light that surrounded it, giving off new shadows. And, you know, is it the best looking game on Nintendo Switch? Well, you could kind of debate that from what type of perspective Pikmin 4 might be a better looking game on that pure polygon count, but it's a smaller scope game. Luigi's Mansion 3, you know, its rooms might be of a higher texture quality, whether the slower pace moving with, you know, three walls that has that one invisible wall. And this game, when you really factor in, gosh, everything has been made and made tangible, not to like, give it a pass on not being as high fidelity, but it's good fidelity with a lot of depth to it and a lot of complexity that allows you to do. So I think that earns it a really high mark in my perspective of, no, it's a very good graphically looking game. Nate? Yeah, look, when I when I'm looking at visuals, I always got to consider platform. Platform is going to present some technical limitations that are going to be something to just consider in some regards, like in Tears of the Kingdom, if you did, this might ruin it for some people. But if you look at the ground, and you look about four feet in front of Link, things are constantly loading in. They had this happen in Breath of the Wild as well. And it's happening in this game. So like there's fauna and stuff like it's not like big things like enemies jumping in. It's just the details of the world and the clarity of it. It's about four feet in front of you. And it's constantly loading in. It's a neat little trick they did, because they're pretty limited in what they can do. Tears of the Kingdom is the first game I've played from Nintendo on Switch that feels like it's almost too big for the platform because of little tricks they're doing like that. Like you can tell they wanted to go further with the visuals. But they had to dial things in a certain way because there's other focuses in the game like the gameplay and all that. But they did do other things like the art style I think is perfect. I thought it was perfect with Breath of the Wild. And you know, maybe I'm a little spoiled by people who have played on emulators and done 4K texture packs and all this stuff to make it look even more gorgeous. But Tears of the Kingdom, the big thing that stands out to me is the three distinct visual styles they went for between the sky, the depths and Hyrule. Hyrule is obviously what you expect. It's what we're known from Breath of the Wild, except now there's a longer draw distance. Things are a bit clearer further away from you, clearly taking advantage of power that Switch has that we used in. But then you got that distinct depth look. You know, the gloom and the purples and the darkness. And it's really just an interesting aesthetic. And then when there is a little bit of color, like when you light up a light route and you get that tinge of orange, it just really stands out in that area because it's just such a different style from, say those fall and autumn colors you get up in the sky. And it's really neat because when I look at the visuals, it's all about does it work? And one of the coolest things that's really fun to do is you go high up on a sky island, jump off and go down past high road down to the depths all seamlessly, which I like the best. Like you get all the visual styles at once. And it's just like, how did they even imagine this possibility? And it just to me really like there's there's absolutely a ton of screenshots and stills you can take in and tears you can just look gorgeous. And then there's ones that maybe don't look so good. And again, considering the hardware it's on and what they had to work with. One thing I think that the Zelda team in particular is shown with these last two games that you sometimes don't always get from other triple A games is the visuals are there to complement the gameplay. And we're going to put our focus into the gameplay first. And in doing that, you're going to sacrifice things visually. Could it be a more visually pleasing game if they didn't have fuse? If they didn't have ultra hand? If they cut back the draw distance? Sure, it could be. But then do you really want to give up the mechanics they had to they want to implement gameplay wise, just to get something that looks prettier. So while it's not, I would say the most gorgeous game in the world. When you combine what they're doing in that world gameplay wise with the visuals to me, it just becomes a really impressive thing. The game can even look at this good for what it's doing. So definitely. Yeah, I'm impressed. And I do think there is a tinge of potential timelessness here. We're not going to know for a while. But I rest of the wild still look solid. But then again, hey, you know, that's not like the switch is 18 times more powerful than a Wii U. So we'll see how this holds up as we get to like that next Zelda game. If they keep this visual style and go even further with it, then you're like, Oh man, maybe those old games don't look as good now. But man, I think that's kind of the case too, right? There's certain areas in something like Wind Waker where you go back to it and I'm sure a texture doesn't look good here or there or whatever. But I think the art style absolutely suits that game to a point where you then you can go back and play it now and it's not like standing out the same way if you play something like Majora or Ocarina or something like that. And I do feel like Breath of the Wild falls more towards that than some of the other 3D games in the franchise. I think this is much closer in line. I feel like with Skyward Sword where Skyward Sword had a very like water color esque kind of feel to it. And even recently when they released Skyward Sword HD, I was like, Oh, I forgot how nice this game actually looks. You go back and play on a Wii and it looks kind of muddy, but you go and play on something like a Switch now it actually looks pretty good. So I definitely feel like it's going to fall more on that side of history. Yeah. Yeah, I think so. It's Nintendo being able to have a more powerful system that could realize their artistic vision, whereas we they kind of had to make sacrifices to really differentiate this from Twilight Princess and not look too obviously, you know, less in visual quality than what PS3 and Xbox 360 could produce by that time in 2011. You know, also don't forget like Skyward Sword came after that beautiful Legend of Zelda demo that we got to play at E3. Yeah. E3. And like that, like that's the future. But that's another point. You know, if we get a game that looks like that, are you going to have as much complexity in terms of the gameplay and what you could do, which speaking of gameplay, we could roll right into that one. Anybody start there, we could take it away. Sure. I think we were. Yeah. You want to talk about Fuse a little bit, Nate? Because I feel like that was something you brought up earlier, and that's obviously a huge talking point. So yeah, I mean, look, the gameplay in this game is in many ways familiar, right? You play, you play Breath of the Wild. You have like the same comment moves. You have the same sneak strike. You got your sailcloth and all that. Well, I'm sorry, not a sailcloth. I keep mixed. I have been mixed in that since day one. You can unlock the sailcloth. That is something you could eventually get. Technically paraglider. But anyway, sorry, we were just a wind waker and I'm like, oh, sailcloth. Oh, wait a second. That's a different game, but similar. We can't anyway. But yeah, no, the paraglider. So there's a lot of familiarity. And I think what the Zelda team did well is realizing this is a direct sequel. We don't need to reinvent the wheel of what the base gameplay is. But what we want to do is provide new things to this gameplay loop that maybe you didn't consider possible. Like we had, you know, when you get into fuse, right, being able to fuse anything together for the most part, almost, I mean, literally, you see a mine cart fuse it to your shield for some reason, but you just want to like you, they're just so many different fuses between your shields and your weapons and obviously the bow be unable to fuse a arrow to pretty much anything in your inventory, even if it doesn't really do anything, you can just do it. And it's fun to experiment with it. And there's still things to this day when I play it that I haven't experimented with much. Like I started throwing some of these dazzle fruits out now. And I'm like, oh, dude, these things are insane. Why did I use this? Like a hundred plus hours. Why was I not using this earlier? This is sick. Like it blinds them. This is on anyways. So there's all these really neat ways in which fusing creates new interactions that we couldn't get in the rest of the while. Yes, some of the interactions are similar, like replacing elemental arrows with, you know, chuchu jellies and stuff like that to get a similar effect of what we're used to. But that's not what stands out to me. It's it's the new effects and the new abilities that are enabled through the fuse ability that's great. And then when you throw that in with everything else, I mean, obviously, I haven't even touched on ultra hand. That is an entire they just put a minecraft in your Zelda. You just build what you want, except with real time physics and a whole bunch of you want to build a mega mech? Build a mega mech. You want to build? Oh, I did. I made a Metal Gear Rex literally in my game that took on Ganondorf and it was incredible. Yeah, seriously. It's so it's so imaginative because the limitations, yes, there are limitations to it. You can only fuse like 20 times. So 21 items together or whatever for the ultra hand stuff. But what's interesting is within those limitations, the amount of crazy things people have come up with, people somehow put a, you know, a very basic calculator into this game. You could do that in Minecraft. Why can we do that in Zelda? What is what are we doing? Like the amount of and I haven't even personally haven't even tried some of the crazy builds because I'm just having a hard time, sometimes just, you know, getting those Addison things to stand up at them. Crazy build. But it's the the creativity. I feel like gameplay wise, this is the game you get what you put into it. So if you're someone who's just going to run through, you've made fuse a weapon or shield. Maybe you've never fused your shield and you play it in a more traditional way. I can see why you might go. The gameplay feels just too much like Breath of the Wild. But I feel like the more creative people out there that are more experimental, they're going to find out that there are new gameplay elements in this game that they never even dreamed of because it just hasn't been present in any other video game before. And, you know, Nintendo given you the quick, you know, they call it a send, you know, because in development, they they was just a tool to get out of backtracking and they realized, well, we don't like backtracking. They're not going to like backtracking. Right. And that's after I'm like, you know what this is? It's just the magic rope. Like we've had this in old school RPGs to quickly get out of caves. Go back to the entrance. I'm like, that's all you did. You gave us a quick get out of jail freak out. But then somehow using that to abuse it's a mechanic to do other crazy things. And that's without even getting into recall, which pretty much can break every shine in the game. Yes. Every shine in the game of recall. Incredibly OP. And I think one of those things that not a lot of people use that much, but it's so funny because, like, again, I was streaming the majority of this and you get to like maybe the 80 or 90 hour mark of the game. And I realized like, oh, I really could have been using recall this whole time and solve half of this. But you forget about it because like just what you were mentioning, Nate, right? The creativity behind some of these fused items and things that you're ultra handing together. You almost don't want to just recall. You want to experiment by creating other things like almost feels like a cheat code sometimes. Exactly. Especially the shrines. Absolutely. And so I feel like when you're actually on the field and you're doing stuff, I try to avoid using recall as much as possible. I try building things and, you know, just a few things that I fused and used a bunch. The rocket shields, I think are so useful just strapping the rocket and then shooting up. It's basically this version's version of Ravalli scale. You just go right up to the sky to in the boats, like creating boats with the electric shock emitter that then has a net to grab fish or grab other items to collect stuff so useful. And then obviously the thing that all of us have built at some point, that very easy, you know, six zone night, seven zone night, whatever bike where you've got the two fans in the little standing. Exactly. These are your way through that people discovered very early on. I mean, obviously, I feel like all of us have used that in some point in time. But again, going back to what you were saying, like you're able to do things in this Zelda that you couldn't do in any other Zelda game and that I also haven't seen you be able to do in anything outside of maybe like a Minecraft or like a Banjo-Kazooie Nuts & Bolts. And I think it's so interesting that when you look at the old Zelda games and what made those games creative and interesting, it was about how you chose to solve the puzzles in a dungeon. And I know in the lead up to Skyward Sword, that was their whole big thing with that game, right? In the open world sections prior to going in the dungeons, they wanted people to be able to solve puzzles in interesting ways. And this really does feel like the actual like expansion of that idea. I feel like Breath of the Wild built on it with the physics engine, but in terms of actually building things to get out of situations and really using your creativity, they bumped it up to 11 in Tears of the Kingdom. And I think it's something that makes the game stand out even aside from Breath of the Wild. Because if you go back and play Breath of the Wild now, that game does feel very streamlined. It's still a great game, obviously, don't get me wrong. But Cryonis and Stasis are abilities that when compared to something like Ultra Hand and Fuse and Recall, it really does feel like the next exactly. It's the next evolution of what that concept was. Yeah. The thing I like, you both nodded at the same time and you said it, Roger, it does feel like the next evolution of those abilities, yet I don't think that it makes Breath of the Wild no longer a valid game to play. Totally. Totally. No Zelda game does that. It's not like after Twilight Princess comes out, you're like, ah, I'm done with Wind Waker. Those are very different, but you don't have that attitude. You don't have like, ah, the hookshot wasn't offering of time. I don't want to get the hookshot again and Wind Waker of anything. You look forward to the legacy items. I think where some people might say, well, is it worth playing Breath of the Wild, even though Tears of the Kingdom does certain things bigger and better? I would still say yes, because they are very different gameplay experiences. And sometimes I do miss that instant Rivali's Gale. But I do have more creative freedom to strap rockets to my shield or to, you know, go and make something that slowly rises me up, but to go far higher than I could ever do with Rivali's Gale. You know, gameplay. You could drop, you could just have a little fire and just drop some pine cones and easy and hot dude. Yeah, that's it. Yeah. Gameplay combat changes up to not just navigating the world, but how you attack. You could just, and like Nate said, how much you put into it is how much you're kind of going to get out. You could just sword swipe and that kind of thing. And that's fun. But you know, there are lots of creative elements. This is massive sandbox of play that you could have. You could be silly with it and make weird looking things and just chop down a whole bunch of trees, tie them together and just hit enemies from the afar like this, or you could be cooler. And there's also I like that it's not necessarily easy. You could attach certain things to an arrow and have a fire arrow and like, oh, that was good, but attach a ruby. Have you done it? It blows up in your face. Of course, of course, stones. Like I've done the ruby of a sapphire. You take out the Phantom Hands. Oh my gosh, those Phantom Hands. It's not just to guarantee the bigger weapon is the best. It's what's the smartest thing to do in the situation, you know, attaching a bomb to your stick. That's not going to work out that well, you can do it, but you could throw it. And that's another layer of the complexity. Mid battle, you could throw something up, recall, ascend through it, pop on top and then now sail from a different perspective while that object falls on that enemy, right? You know, different enemy bases. I was like, could this work? So, you know, the giant Bacoblin, right? The big boys I would take up that great, put it over them and then drag them to the fire pit. Sure, exactly. It sounds cool. But his health is slowly going down, slowly going down. And the other ones are like scattering around trying to help out, but they can't. And like, this is fun. It gives you this ultimate sandbox level of creativity. And that blends in well with the three different levels because you could take that gameplay sometimes the gameplay. And I think what some people sell the game short on that, I get it. I grew up on classic Zelda. I love classic Zelda as well. But sometimes you could only really experience this item in this dungeon. And yeah, you could access it outside, but you couldn't use it outside, right? Reverse, you could use anything in any dungeon. So this dungeon is not designed around rails. But if you want a rail, you could strap that mind part to your, you know, shield and you could roll around it or, you know, use fire in the fire or fire in the ice instead of just one or the other. And the more you play, I think the more you're rewarded from and gameplay wise might be where this game shines the most because it offers the most honestly. Absolutely. And you hit on something earlier too that I think is really important is you mentioned the complexity and the difficulty. I feel like far and away, especially having just played through master mode again in Breath of the Wild. This is the most difficult mainline Zelda game since Zelda two. I don't think there's really any other Zelda games since then that has been this complicated and this punishing. I feel like very early on, if you are in the depths and even very late into the game, right? You could be 60 70 hours in if you haven't pumped up your your your heart. So your stamina enough or you haven't built up your stamina early enough, you can't get your sword. If you don't have the right type of additional materials and the right things to eat, you're going to die almost instantly to like very basic enemies that are on the field in ways that I think most other Zelda games, right? Like if you're just standing there in Ocarina of time and a cell phones is swiping at you, it'll still take quite a few hits to actually kill you. Whereas in this one, one or two wrong moves with the Pocoblin and you're dead. And I again, I think that adds to the beauty of it because then it forces you to be more complex. It forces you to think out of the box on how to kill these guys to make torture machines or fire greats or, you know, all these other different things and and also adding to that where you had mentioned the whole thing about, you know, if I try this, is it going to work? You know, if I throw the great up in the air and try to recall into it, is it going to manage to work? And I think the amazing thing about Tears of the Kingdom that I'm sure both of you agree with is that it does 99% of the time work. And I think that's a testament to how amazing this game is. When you consider Breath of the Wild was very much the same way. But again, the complexity wasn't quite there. Not to say that obviously that game wasn't a masterpiece and they didn't work on it and really try to hone things in. But for the tool set that they provided you, it was great. But with this and the mechanics that are in place in this game, you would imagine, you know, a lesser developer would absolutely look over things and you'd be able to break the game far easier than you do in this one, which is pretty phenomenal when you take that into consideration. Yeah, the game doesn't break. I mean, I'm sure you'll find a way, but in normal gameplay, you're going to have a good quality time. And with how many things are going on the screen, still maintaining a fair, a fair frame rate with the fair resolution and everything being, you know, fine. And you could get pretty crazy with what you could create. You could put a lot of bombs and lasers going off at the same time in a well packed, you know, village of baddies and no, no issues. Yeah, how about this one we could kind of go too big in or we could keep it shorter, but story and or lore, you know, I mean, there could be another discussion on this, but I really like this game's story. I felt that since Skyward Sword, Nintendo really was pushing story more, like having more onscreen footage of what's going on in the game and Breath of the Wild, really kind of what happened in the past. And this time a little bit more present and past things going on with fighting the tears with doing select missions. By the way, this is, you know, spoiler free discussion. If you want at this point, you're like, what? Get into the last boss, you know, he turns into a dragon. Yeah, he does. OK. Sorry, but. It really makes you think of is this a reboot? Can it work within? Does this branch off a new angle? What about Ganondorf? It's not the same Ganondorf. Is it a new Ganondorf born? The whole, you know, trying to make it work and we try to make it work as fans and Nintendo does a good job of telling you and what they tell you sometimes is enough. But sometimes you kind of have to dive deep. I feel like this game really is. I wanted to mention it earlier, but this game is as multiplayer as it gets for a single player game. And that's because of the community around it. And maybe we're fortunate that we live in an online era. And maybe that's why, you know, Nintendo, they're very on top of creating new things that fit that generation. And this generation is all about online and social sharing. So it's like, would this game have worked as well in a in the earlier era, even if they had the CPU power? Maybe not necessarily, but now with the sharing thing, it's like, oh, Metal Gear Rex, how do I do that? OK, do that motorcycle that could go? How do I do that? So part of that multiplayer aspect also comes into that story because plenty of people online are discussing the story. And I, for one, love the story. I thought the voice acting was awesome from that perspective. You know, Minoru, good voice actor, voice voice actress, Heather Gonzalez, Princess Zelda, Mercer, for Ganondorf, even Link, you know, he sounds good. He's humming a little bit more. So we get a little more of a link, which is kind of a cute little addition when he's creating food. But when he's cooking, for sure. Yeah. How do you feel about the overall story lore? If you want to go into does it fit into the series? You can. But like I said, that's going to be a little bit longer. But overall, you know, do you like it? Not like it? Want something else added? I'll tell you one thing that I wish that was kind of added. This is sort of also how I felt in Breath of the Wild. But Matt could understand because maybe Ganondorf was climate again, it was contained at the castle. But this Ganondorf, he wasn't contained. Why didn't we see him out in the open? In a future Zelda game, I would like Hey, Nintendo, if you want to tell the story from the back end, that's fine. But the main big bad guy, I'd kind of like to see him or her or that individual, that monster, whomever it is, sort of interacting in the here and now. If you could find a way to tie that in to still have an open ended game, because I think this is the way that the Zelda series should be handled is this open ended nature and not as much linear, which you kind of lose the story when you go nonlinear. But if you could find a way, have the main villain have his present be felt more throughout the current story, not just through the back. But that is the one not really complaint. Just I kind of would like to see this going forward, but I'll take it any way you want. Yeah, I think I could really quickly tell a little bit of and give a little bit of backstory with like the timeline placement thing. Cause I just did the discussion with Japan time literally a week ago. And so it's kind of fresh in my mind, but two things real quick on the topic of story, just really briefly. One, I love the story in this one. I think it's significantly better than Breath of the Wilds, but I do feel like it's kind of scattered in the way that it's told, where I do wish there was almost a little bit more of a formula with how you find the tears, where unless you get to that area where you're following that Inba quest all the way through, you're probably most likely more than not going to find the tears out of order. And I do feel like if you find certain tears before other ones, it ends up spoiling things that are going to end up happening later on. And so I read it in a fortunate situation where a character's death was like the second tier that I saw. And so the story was told a little bit of out of order for me, but I still very much enjoyed it. The second thing I want to mention really quickly in terms of the story stuff, I agree with you. I think the voice acting is really good on the topic of Ganondorf being like the one Ganondorf, why wasn't he out there walking around and like what was up with him under the castle? So the way this has been described to me because obviously Nintendo and you know this Nate like had no idea for a Zelda timeline until the fans wanted to put one together. And then they were like, let's retroactively create the Hyrule Historia, let's finalize this timeline. Let's say there was actually a reason for all of this. Whereas in this game now, this is the first, well this and Breath of the Wild, right? Are the two first mainline Zelda games that have been created since the creation of the official Hyrule Historia timeline that now Nintendo uses moving forward. Breath of the Wild, they've already stated because that game came out when they created the timeline, right? Is the latest game in the timeline. But because the timeline was published prior to Breath of the Wild's release, there's no clear placement on the timeline of if it takes place on any of the three tridents or if it's like far future kind of like a convergence type of thing. And you can kind of guesstimate based on what's present in Breath of the Wild, right? That you've got the Koroks there with the Rito. You've got aspects of all of these different timelines, the references to the imprisoning war, the references to the Ocarina of Time Ganon, Majora's Mask being present in there. There's all these things that clearly tie to the previous games, which lead me to believe that, like you mentioned, Paul, this could, and especially with things in this game, this is kind of a potential reboot for the series. But I do think still takes place on the timeline, but it's just so in the far future that now it's sort of like creating its own thing. And I think future Zelda games will probably build upon the things they put in place here. With that being said, where some of this stuff takes place is kind of interesting, because Miyamoto has gone on the record and other developers have gone on the record saying that the legend of Zelda, the story of Zelda, the things like the imprisoning war, Ganondorf, whatever, the idea is that the story is told and passed down through generations and generations. So it's not gonna be exactly the same in every game, and things are gonna change whether something's a thousand years out from what had happened or a millennia out from what had happened. And you look at something like the imprisoning war, which is finally seen for the first time in official Zelda canon, you see the actual imprisoning war with the sages and with Ganondorf and with Rauru and with the arm. And now we know that Zelda as the sage of time was present during the actual imprisoning war, which then leads people to go, okay, well, wait a minute. If this is the imprisoning war that they were talking about in a link to the past, but obviously it was so far removed in terms of millennia of different Zelda and Link, like what does this mean for the story? Does this mean that Zelda, throughout the course of all of the original games that we played through from Ocarina of Times, all the way leading up to Twilight Princess and Woodwaker and Spirit Tracks, everything, was she just chilling up in the sky the whole time waiting for Link in Tears of the Kingdom? And it does kind of seem like that's the case. And I think that's another really interesting thing that's brought up in the story of this game regarding Ganondorf, right? Because in Skyward Sword, by the end of that game, you see the original Link and the original Zelda founding Hyrule. Now, obviously Hyrule is not gonna be built in a day, right? They've been founding things for generations and eventually we get to the Hyrule that we see in the past, it's First King with Rauru and with Sonya. But that means that Sonya is most likely the child or granddaughter or great granddaughter of the Zelda and Link that we saw in Skyward Sword. And we know based on what is in this game, they straight up tell you and reference and play Fi's theme from Skyward Sword. So Fi exists, Skyward Sword is on this timeline. It is there, clear as day. It's just, it's not really clear where sort of the imprisoning war and the stuff with Sonya takes place. Again, it could be like one generation, two generations out from Skyward Sword, but at the very least the sword is the same sword. They reference it directly, they talk about it directly. Imprisoning war has been talked about directly. So there are definitely story ties here for people who want that in-depth look at all the different things they're referencing. But I think more than anything else, if we're talking about story, the Zonai to me are the number one reason why I feel like this is kind of a reboot, right? Where I think moving forward, Zonai is going to be a very easy explanation for a lot of stuff in the past that was not necessarily clarified. There was an ancient tribe that, like they heralded this evil mask and there was somebody named Majora who was on the moon in space that somehow was this ancient incarnation of evil. Well, the end of Tears of the Kingdom is Ganondorf literally gets nuked in the face. So Ganondorf's not coming back and they clarified multiple times in the story, this is the main original Ganondorf, right? That all of the other iterations of Ganondorf, Ocarina of Time Ganondorf, Twilight Princess Ganondorf, all these other Ganondorf, well, technically that's the same one, but whatever. But like all the other incarnations of Ganon that we've experienced up to this point in the story that we assumed were the main Ganons were actually just kind of the same as Calamity Ganon in Breath of the Wild. They were the little bits and pieces that eat out over the years, right? Where they talk about in Tears of the Kingdom how every generation has had bits of Ganondorf sort of leak out into the main world, but it's never actually been the original one from the imprisoning war. And so now with, and if this is the last game of the timeline and this Ganondorf is finally done, I think future games could see us either seeing a return to something like Vaati or Majora and those big enemies and villains being retconned into somehow having a tie with the Zonai. So I think the Zonai is a really easy catch-all for whatever they're gonna do for the future of the story. But I tried to keep that as concise as possible. I'm sorry I talked a lot. There was a lot of stuff there and I think it does explain a lot of what happens with the story here, yeah. Yeah, and I mean, I'll keep it super brief because we covered a lot of stuff that what Roger said, you know, for starters, the story itself, look, I think it's one of the better stories in Zelda, just collectively, not necessarily in how it's told in some ways, but as a collection, I do really like the overall story. You just sit back and look at it and watch all the cut scenes again and think about some of the little bits that are told in some of the main quest lines. And it's just, it's really good. It's cohesive. It's cohesive in the sense of Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom, everything else, up to your imagination. Do we get debate for days on how it squeezes into the timeline? Does it split off from Skyward Sword in some way? Nobody really knows. It's all left up to us to debate all of that stuff. But there are just a couple of things that I wish they would have did different in how it was told a little bit, as much as it's really cool that you could follow the quest line. We talked about getting the Tears out of order. And yes, when you do the very beginning of that quest line, if you did do that, there's a point where you could take a picture of a map. Well, when I got to that room, I didn't have a camera yet. So I could take, I mean, I could screenshot. I could hit the screenshot button, but I'm like, I want to exit the game every time I want to see where I got to go next. So then I sat back and I thought about it. And I realized that what I really just wanted them to do is just not have all the Tears available at once to even discover in the first place. You won't be able to discover, say, memory two until you already did one. And I feel like if they would have just did that, it still could have kept the open world. But suddenly, an area you've maybe been to before now had something change in it. And that was one thing when you got to, you know, and that this does happen, like the final Tear that you get wasn't there that entire time that you were going for all those other Tears. I kept thinking, why didn't they just do this the whole time? Because one thing that I kind of have is maybe an overarching criticism of both Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom is that while like in Tears of the Kingdom specifically we'll focus on that for the review, they, we can fix things that already broke. Nothing else really breaks during the course of your adventure. Nothing really changes. The world is what it is. And when you got this big baddie who finally broke loose after 10,000 plus years or whatever it's been, and he just kind of just, you know, he has this big explosion from his chest, causes all these crazy things. You come back down to Hyrule and then he just does nothing else, the whole game. He just, he's just waiting for you to show up. And that's to Paul Gale's point where it's like he's not ever present outside of the memories and we're seeing all the stuff in the past. Why is he not doing more in the present? He's just chilling, assuming he's gonna win when he already knows, as we find out, he knows Link's name. He knows Link is the one that was supposed to stop him in the future. He's well aware of it. And that's, there's that whole dialogue on your face and that's really epic and awesome. And how much more epic would it have been if he would have been ever present throughout the game? I kept thinking of like the first time that I encountered the gloom hands that led to Phantom Ganon. That very first time it happens in the overworld. You're like, wait a second. What is a Zelda fan? You're like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. This is like an entire boss of like a dungeon in Aquamanian Time. What are we doing right now? And then all of a sudden you find out he's all over the place, but there isn't really any connection. Like we connect to it as like Zelda lore heads, but then for new players, they're like, well, what is this? There's no real meaning put into it because there's nothing. It's just something you fight and you move on. And it's just always there to respawns every Blood Moon. You're like, oh, so it's just like every other enemy. And now later on your journey to Ganondorf, oh, some meaning gets put to it a little bit, but that's because you're going to the end of the game. And that's one thing that as much as I love the overall story, just how they tell it and the fact that while we can make positive changes to the world, there's no fight back against the positive changes, which doesn't feel right when this is the biggest, baddest, meanest, anything that we fought in Zelda history, so much so that your OG sages literally had to basically sacrifice themselves to even, just to even keep him at bay. They couldn't even stop him. This is a baddie that had one stone. They had like six and they couldn't stop him. Like they had to sacrifice just to prevent him from destroying the world, but yeah, they couldn't defeat him and take him out. And this Link guy who doesn't have any of the stones is suddenly supposed to be the hero because he's got the master sword that he shatters at the beginning of the game. And you're just like, what are we talking about? And it's such like an epic setup and an epic and the beginning and end are like my favorite moments in any Zelda game story wise. Oh yeah, amazing. Just amazing. So I ranked the overall story really high. There's just a lot of criticism of what happened, the way they approached telling it that could have been a bit better. Not so much the story itself is good, just how we could have experienced the story. And then just the fact that this we're being told about how powerful and how amazing he is and he's back. So why are we not seeing him do use any of this amazing epic power? What is going on? Why? I am kind of, I'm right there with you too when you mentioned the thing about the way it's told being the criticism because I think the place in which I felt it the most were the dungeons, right? When you get to the end of the dungeon and you get the tier and you get the same cut scene four times. Same cut scene, same cut scene, yeah. And I wish they would have changed that and changed up to perspective a little bit or revealed something new as you progress further the game. Like something that notes in the game like, oh, this is the third dungeon you've gone through. So here's the additional. Right, so that's one big thing that I feel about too, definitely. And then I think the counter argument to what you mentioned regarding like him being present, I think would be the Phantom Zelda thing. Sure, sure, yeah. Being present and throughout the course of the game, yeah, him being the ones to then instigate the stuff that happens at the dungeons with the sludge in the water temple or like when you go to Hyrule Castle, I think that is probably how they assumed the player would interact. But the thing is like you said, at that point in the story, you don't know until after you've done the four dungeons that that Zelda is actually Phantom Zelda and not Zelda. So I think there, yeah, there's a little point you can figure it out because in one of the tier memories, he uses that same trick. Right. And if you get to that. And you get that memory. So yeah, then you know, right. You just know that like, OK. Well, you guys are falling. You guys think this is Zelda? OK, Link knows it's not. Can I just tell you? Stop. Right. Right. And so that probably was their idea. I don't know that it worked as well as maybe they thought it. And I agree with you. Yeah, if you didn't rush to do the memories, sure, maybe it worked really, really well for it. But a lot of people are like, but in most games, stories are sort of told in a linear path. And we got a massive story at the very beginning of the game. A lot of people aren't going to want to go 100 hours until they experience story again. So like they're going to seek out some of the tears. It's just going to happen. And so I do and obviously get it out of work. Imagine it's the first memory you got and you just know right out the gate that that's just not. I kept thinking, and this is the big thing because the Master Sword is clearly intended to be used in that final battle. It's why it doesn't lose power in the whole final fight. It's meant to be used. OK, so then why at that point when we're in that lead up to them, we're in the lead up to them, we're up in the castle and Zelda's about to. We know that that's not her, but it's trying to emotionally make you feel like it's her. But you know it's not her. At this point, you know she's the dragon. You know, like, like, there's no tricking me at this point. And so I didn't really understand what they were doing with that. I was like, I'm chasing around this thing I know isn't her. But you're trying to make it feel like I'm supposed to feel like it is her. So some confusing parts, I think, how they piece it together. And I know in like interviews and stuff, they always talk about, hey, we sort of just put the story on after we get the game play together and maybe it doesn't always work out as well. But look, the overall story is amazing. One of the best ones in Zelda history. Like, I don't know if it's my favorite overall. Let's see Skyward Sword is really high up there because that one, I mean, that one was clearly like, we were telling you a book and start to finish. Oh, yeah. And again, I think Skyward Sword, that was the first game. Oh, they did it too. Pre, that was the last game pre the story of being put in place, right? So they did that with the intention of we are making the first Zelda game that is going to set in place everything else forever now that we actually have an official timeline. And then it's just ironic that you have Link Between Worlds, Triforce Heroes, and then they're like, we're gonna soft reboot and we're gonna put it all the way at the very end and do this again. Like, it's just kind of funny that that's how it worked out. But yeah, I think another thing going back to what you had mentioned, like him being under the castle and the sword, and we talked a little bit about like her potentially being in the sky throughout all those other Zelda games. I almost feel like, because people brought up, if you go back to the first sequence, in the opening sequence, at the end of the game, you can use the bombs on the wall and then actually see that she was the dragon and you could see her fixing the sword and all that stuff on the mural on the wall that we could have seen in the beginning of the game, but it was covered up by rocks. I feel like it's implied that she was always there. And that always happened. But I also think there's an argument to be made about like a time loop type of thing, right? Where had they not gone down and Raoru's arm did not see Lincoln's Zelda there and that didn't set off everything that kicks off at the beginning of the game that she never would have become a dragon in the first place. So it's kind of like a back to the future type deal, which is I think probably why they ended up showing the mural with the rocks at the beginning, but then having it covered. So then it's up to interpretation. Was she always behind there? But I think by the end of the game, it's confirmed now that like she is there in the past as a dragon the whole time, waiting for Lincoln healing up the master sword. Because again, that throws in the weird loop of, okay, well, if this is the master sword and this is clearly fine. What the hell has been all the other master swords? Right. So I think the assumption is that the master sword is crafted in Skyward Sword, right? Exists throughout all of time, leading up to Breath of the Wild as the last game on the timeline. And then as Zelda, you know, the whole beginning of Tears of the Kingdom happens and the master sword breaks and she is healing it, that then creates either a timeline split or then changes it sort of like Infinity Stone style with the Avengers movies. What they were always there, but Zelda was present in the sky, but there was basically like two master swords existing. The one on the original timeline and then the one on the parallel timeline that was being healed to lead up to Tears of the Kingdom. So it's weird. Like again, it creates a loop, but it also kind of makes sense for what we've seen in the story moving forward. And if they want to retcon certain things with the Zonai, like I think they can do that by having these creatures up in space that maybe, you know, whether that's a relationship to the Zonai. Zonai is how we explained everything. That's what we said earlier. Well, what's the master sword conundrum? Zonai, don't worry about it. Exactly, don't worry about it. Right, right. What about the Triforce? It's Secret Stone's Zonai. Don't worry about it. You look at something even as similar as when New Hyrule is founded in Spirit Tracks, like on the Wind Waker split of the timeline, that there's the ancient little people that are in their wheelchair things, and then what are they called in that game? Oh my gosh, I'm drawing a blank. Oh, but like the people up, you could easily retcon that and be like, oh, there are actually descendants of Zonai. Very easily, you can do that. And I think there's a lot of stuff like that for old games on the timeline, like pre-What Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom are setting in place, that if they really do wanna create a full-on timeline of like, this is what the games are like, I think they can go back and retcon some of that and do it. Or I think they could very easily say this is the timeline pre-Zelda going back and fixing the master sword, and that's one timeline. And then from that moment onward, that creates the new parallel timeline of where everything moving forward is gonna be. Yeah, I think in the end, one thing is very clear, and I think everybody who, if you're an old school Zelda fan, you know this, if you're a new Zelda fan, it doesn't really matter, good for you, because at the end of Tears of the Kingdom, the feeling is this is a reboot in at least one sense. They are resetting what the expectations are for the future of Zelda period. And if you just started and very likely, many of you watching this, your first Zelda game was Breath of the Wild, because hello, 30 million, never been done with Zelda. Lots of people's first Zelda game is Breath of the Wild. So for you guys, it doesn't matter, it all makes sense to you, because the prior games don't really matter that much. But to us old heads, it matters, but also we got that reboot feeling as well. We know what's going on. And because of that, I think it just gave them a clean slate. I think that was maybe their goal with Breath of the Wild in Tears of the Kingdom. We wanna clean slate as clean as you can get. People will always argue the slate's never clean because the Zelda lore goes on forever. But as clean as slate is, they tend to be like, hey, for the next game, you're not thinking about those old games anymore. You're thinking about Breath of the Wild, Tears of the Kingdom and what they set up, what's gonna be next. Like, hey, Gandalf is now eradicated. What now? Hey, guess what? He went away in a way demise didn't even go away this way. So that means demise is still floating around somewhere because his remains were locked in the master sword and he was supposed to decay over time and go away. But yet he never got nuked. I can say that. He was never nuked. So that's a definitive. There's an argument that might as well back somehow with time travel, you never know what's gonna happen. So, and I swear, Nintendo, if the next Zelda game, I know this is unrelated to the review, you bring Ganondorf back through some time travel bullshit and you don't take advantage, should bring back either one of the older enemies that does exist or create a brand new entity to, I mean, that's what I'm really excited about. I was like, what if there's something new that we just don't know? Do you can surprise us now? Just don't pull a Zant into all that princess wear. I felt like you were surprising me then. And then you twist the key and it's Ganondorf. I'm like, no, no, Zant was so bad ass. What are you doing? I do think you're onto something too with the future games. Cause I think if they wanted to do that, the beautiful thing about what they set up in tears of the kingdom is you have literally a millennia of time in between the three timelines ending on the original timeline, leading up to breath of the wild. That is right for future traditional style Zelda games. I think like in terms of gameplay and both story, I think breath of the wild in tears of the kingdom are like full on a paradigm shift. Like I don't know about you guys, but I really feel like the next 3D Zelda, whatever it ends up being, I think it's going to take a long time before we get it. And we'll more likely than not get like a top-down 2D style one again. I would not be surprised if Ganondorf is the villain in that or Ganon or some iteration of him is the villain. And the 2D ones moving forward are kind of like your classic traditional regular dungeon, story, small key, open up a treasure chest type games in the same way that we have 2D Mario and 3D Mario, right? Like both coexist just fine now. I think we're now living in a world kind of, in a post tears of the kingdom, breath of the wild world in which you've got top-down 2D Zelda representative for the old fans, the more simple kind of you go into a dungeon, you tell a story and that could take place on those old timelines. And then you've got the new style of Zelda, the breath of the wild tears of the kingdom-esque one that's big and open world and what people are used to. Then I think moves forward, whatever the next main story is going to be with the only thing that I think maybe being the exception of this. And I think this is kind of important for two games in the franchise specifically is I think Zelda one and Zelda two because they are such old games and because there's a lot of story stuff there that now when you look at what's introduced in breath of the wild and tears of the kingdom could really benefit from being remade in the breath of the wild tears of the kingdom engine in which they can actually spend time crafting a new game and in the interim giving us a remake of one of those older ones that again still takes place in that old timeline but then also gives us a little bit more of a flesh out story and connects those old games to the timeline that we now know with tears of the kingdom and breath of the wild who knows maybe there were Zonai remnants in Zelda one and Zelda two that we weren't aware of or things that took place in those games like who knows dark link the stuff of the temple who's to say the temple from Zelda two wasn't like a Zonai temple similar to what we see in this game who's to say that the underground areas in Zelda one weren't actually the depths in the first place when you go down into and you enter into those dungeons who's to say those weren't literally in the depths there's so much they could do that I think is ripe for reinterpretation because of sort of the log book that they put in place with Zelda one and Zelda two that I think there's a lot of other things they could put in place story wise and gameplay wise before we even get to the next big mainline new 3D Zelda game. I think they're living on like 10 years of borrowed time right now before they really even need to do that where they could do a 2D game, a top down game, a remake game in the breath of the wild engine and another 2D game before even getting a full on tears of the kingdom sequel if they do end up doing that. And you're starting to make me feel like I'm not going to play the next Zelda until I'm 50. Oh, there's a lot of them. You might not, to be fair. Yeah, we don't know. We're like, oh man, we just did breath of the wild cheers game. We're going to reinvent the wheel again. Oh, it's a decade. If I think the Legend of Zelda series right now is somewhere at 150 million. Yes. But the combination of breath of the wild and tears of the kingdom make up about a third. Exactly. Yeah, a third, 50 million nearly out of 150 million. So that's of Zelda's 36 year history in the last six years. So in one sixth of the time it made up one third of the sales. That's a lot. So going forward, what worked is going to be the next big title. 100%. I don't know if they'll return to smaller 2D ones but they have so much ammunition to go forward with this three model. Continue tinkering in it. Maybe they'll listen to a review crew and say, okay, we'll have the next baddies show up a little bit more often. We're talking directly to... To you, Nintendo. That's right. Aonuma, you're listening, right? I think a simple solution could have been, like for the tears, for instance, which one you find first is the first part of the story. They kind of gear that towards the areas that you're going to go towards first are probably going to be the earlier ones but not guaranteed. And this is where it kind of clashed. I didn't even have the first memory until right before the end because I wanted the true ending. The Deku tree. Yeah. And I'm like, there was nothing that made me want to go there. I kept thinking back like, why didn't I get that one? But I didn't realize you have to talk to him afterwards to get it. I just cleared it. I cleared up the forest. I thought I was good to go. Yeah. Yeah, there was nothing that really directed me. They're like, I know the master sword isn't there. So why the hell do I even want to go there right now? Hetsu's just chilling in my main village. Super convenient to drop off Korok seeds. What are we worrying about the Korok forest right now? I'm not even thinking of going north right now. What are we doing? But that's kind of the thing. Like I enjoyed this game getting lost. Going where I wasn't supposed to. Definitely. I'm going to try to go through that sandstorm. I'm like six hearts in. That's way too difficult for me. That ended up being my second dungeon, my second tunnel. Oh, wow. And my map wasn't even, I didn't even have a lot of towers yet. I was just going through. I couldn't even see. I didn't even go to Hateno Village and get the hero's path. So. Oh, sure. Later on, I could be like, whoa, I went from here and like this really skinny green lion like here. And but that's part of the fun factor. But see that sort of exploration and you're tempted to see everything in any kind of order that compels you. Go up to the highest platform that you can in the sky and then use as much sunlight as you can to go as far as you can. That kind of contradicts the finding the story elements because those could be deterrent if you find the wrong one. Like I didn't find them all in order but I didn't find them in too badly of an order out of order I should say to ruin it. But that's one of the things like what if you just each one you found happened to be the next chronological one that told the story. Maybe that would have worked better, maybe not, I don't know, but the last little bit of thing on story before I guess we kind of go into music and then any other final thoughts would be. What do you think about it as a sequel to Breath of the Wild? Because it sometimes felt like a sequel and sometimes characters like, you don't remember me? I did a lot more, it's only been five years. Overall, I could feel that it was a sequel for us but also not being called Breath of the Something or Something of the Wild. It does feel like a more accessible game by everyone because it's jumped right into Tears of the Kingdom. And Nintendo said recently, when they announced that the game sold to 18.51 million consumers but 15 and a half million people that purchased it yet. Whatever, 18 million people overall. A lot of those people were not Breath of the Wild owners. So you can see it worked. And then that means, if you have something with a two, there's always that, oh, I didn't play the first, should I bother, maybe I'll skip it. This way I did it. But do you have any final thoughts on story of, did it feel like a sequel? Was it as sequel-ish as you wanted it to be or not so much? And then we'll go on from there. I will say it stands fine on its own. It stands totally fine on its own. Every Zelda game can stand on its own. So it stands just fine on its own. There are those weird moments where some characters don't seem to remember you or maybe they do remember you but the way that they do just doesn't seem correct to what happened in Breath of the Wild. And I understand, it's very hard in the game this large to try to create that 100% cohesion with everyone. But what I will say is, obviously as someone who beat Breath of the Wild, it, the game, I almost think Tears of the Kingdom had a bigger impact on me because of Breath of the Wild. So it definitely felt like a sequel to me because everything that happened to Breath of the Wild while you don't need that to play Tears of the Kingdom, I think it adds added context. Whatever people want to criticize the story and all this stuff in Breath of the Wild, I'm sorry, what happened there is why I give a shit about Zelda. It just is what it is. Nothing happens in this game to make you care about Zelda, but what makes you care is what happened in the past. Like that's what makes like the moment when you find the torch right before going to the end of the bottom. That's what made that so emotional. Yes, because that happened at the beginning of the game but you actually gave a shit what happened to her at the very beginning of the game. Like because of what she did in the hundred years and you sacrificing yourself to protect her, which enabled her to find her power to put him at a standstill and like all this stuff, all the emotional moments that happened. You know, you read Zelda's diary, you know, if you got all that intriguing, you realize that she freaking loves Link, what? Yeah. What? The house. The house. Yeah, the house, exactly, right. Well, they potentially might have lived together. I don't know what gave her the house. There was a new room. She might have just taken over. She might have moved in and then she took over. Now it's Zelda's house. What was interesting is like, oh, people don't remember like, yeah, because I'm off doing things with Zelda all the time. I'm like, well, okay, come on. Yeah. Come on. Zelda loves the man. We already know this from the diary. Come on. I agree with you with the champions too. Cause I feel like for me, the moment of Sidon showing up and fighting alongside him or Riju, I mean, that stuff absolutely hit way more because you play Breath of the Wild. And even like the first entrance you see you know, Bo, right? When you see you know, Bo, you remember him as his bumbling goofball. He's just like, you're going to be the new champion. He's just like jerk wrestler dude. And I'm like, who are you? What happened to you? Hi, I'm Rockbeat. Yeah, exactly. That type of thing made that so much more interesting and fun. So yeah, I definitely think in that aspect, it works as a sequel to Breath of the Wild. I think the only thing, like both of you had already mentioned, there's certain NPCs here and there who, you know, don't necessarily remember a link in the way that you remember it. But at the same time, I think the side quests that I thought were important and seeing certain characters again, like Hudson and Terry Town, like seeing Terry Town built up into this metropolis of Hyrule now, that's like the construction hub of the entire world. When you remember it, just being like this little plot that you built from the ground up with these little box houses in Breath of the Wild is so cool and makes you love those characters all the more and want to do those side quests in Terry Town and makes it so much cooler that you see like it's become this vibrant community because of you in the first game. Yeah. And like everything that happened, you go to like Hateno and you see that Zelda built a school there and all this stuff. That is just so much more impact because of Breath of the Wild. So while like every Zelda game it stands on its own, this is one of the first sequels, like Majora's Mask back in the day didn't really hit harder for me because of Ocarina of Time. You can talk about the Navi stuff and even that's never even been confirmed. You're just after a lost friend. But nothing that really happens in Majora's Mask I think slaps hard because of the story and stuff in Ocarina of Time. It's sort of its own thing. Yes. But this direct sequel, it's like if you played Breath of the Wild, you are being massively rewarded with additional feelings that you're having while going through this game. And so as a sequel to me, it absolutely worked. But I don't know, Paul sort of suggested maybe it did. So I don't know. We're going to find out in our final review scores, I guess. Yeah. Any thoughts on music, music and or audio design from weapons? Better than Breath of the Wild. So much better. In every single conceivable way. Yeah. Every boss battle, every boss battle, it's own theme. Dungeons, every temple had a unique build up to it. Dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, like, ah, I loved each. So many calls. I actually liked each. Well, they don't really touch on that too much, but I guess I'll throw in the bosses with the music. I loved each boss. I thought each was back to the Zelda bosses that I liked in the past where they're all very different. Like I would buy an amiibo of each one and they all look distinct and cool, but really playing on the music. I thought the music was a very strong part for the series. If you want to throw in voice acting, I thought that was also a good contribution to the audio portion of my review being good. Weapons sounding different, crackling things from throwing this item, burning things, sounding from this. I mean, just the amount of technical prowess that Nintendo had to put in to just make everything work. And that's amazing from, you know, I sometimes think of, you know, you watch a streamer play blind, right? And those exist and that's awesome when they do it. I think it's just how much in for a treat. No, I mean, like literally you cannot see. I mean, like never having played a Zelda game ever. Oh, I understand. You don't have vision. Oh, you mean visually? Oh, I got you understand. Okay, okay, okay. And I've watched a few videos over the years where the games that nail it right, they could tell where there's a wall because they use this sword to climb the wall and to bounce them off of the grass onto the dirt so they could follow the dirt path. And like I give major props to, first of all, any kind of assistance or adaptive kind of controls or within the menus that help as many gamers play as possible. I think that's a beautiful thing. But also when the game is sophisticated enough and different enough that it gives someone who is hard of hearing or without eyesight to actually play, you're in for a treat in the audio department, I think. Because yeah, it might take a while to scroll through because there's no audio cue on the big roll index of how many things you have to flip through, which I guess that would be maybe a control issue if we dive into that. How could they have fixed that? Maybe with a circle that you could pop up instead. That would be a little bit quicker than scrolling from left to right. But once you get there, you would know, ah, this is how this is affecting that enemy. And yeah, just throwing that a little bit in there because I do enjoy many communities playing it. And for me, I was in for an audio treat and I just hope that others that maybe if you can't see you also enjoyed that audio perspective. But yeah, any last musical thoughts? Sound design was great. Just in general, we went beyond the music, but I always loved the sound design, even Breath of the Wild, and I enjoyed the music and stuff in Breath of the Wild too. This just took it to another level. I think what's interesting is, I think a lot of people will play this game in like maybe five years from now, struggle to think back on one key song that just sticks in their head. And I think this is just the direction that Zelda's gonna be in the future where the music's great. It's amazing and it perfectly fits what's going on, but they're not trying to let the music be the thing that dominates. And in Prior's Zelda games, they are dropping bangers, Gerudo Desert, and all like you remember it so vividly, sailing, you know, the theme when you're sailing on in the Wind Waker. You remember the Hobo World themes? Yeah. Yeah. Of course, yeah. Now that music is glorious and amazing, but also a lot of that music is playing to distract you from the fact that you're not really doing a whole lot at the moment. And this game in Breath of the Wild set it up is it's not just about the ambiance and hearing nature. It's also just about it's complimentary. It's not meant to be distracting. Right. And I think, well, I don't think I've ever described Zelda music as being distracting. It's not because there's nothing to distract me from because I'm not doing anything. I'm just running. I'm just sailing. I'm just, oh, I entered a dungeon. The dungeon music is, oh, really cool. Yeah. And then it kind of fades away as I'm actually doing things. It only comes back into focus for me when I stop. And while we're not getting maybe as, you know, those sort of banging tunes that we're always going to remember for all of time, I do think it's one of those, that's not what Zelda is now. This is a new era of Zelda where the gameplay is really what matters. And they constantly want you doing something gameplay wise in this world. And the gameplay is so fun and so imaginative in ways that you don't need that banger hitting in your head, making you bob all the time. And even then there's moments. Oh, 100% moments. And there's certainly some amazing tracks. I was so much better. Way more variety, way more tracks, way more callbacks in Breath of the Wild, that. And I love them. Could I tell you the name of any of them? Can I tell you that I've sat down and just played through the entire soundtrack of Tears of the Kingdoms since it came out? No, I haven't. I could tell you what. When I play. Koldera's theme in the Wind Temple is one of the best boss themes in the history of the Legend of Zelda. I'm gonna give you that, yeah. When that happens and you hear the music from Dragon Roost, knowing about the Rito and all the stuff in Wind Waker and you're in this Wind Temple, that's meant to be this like ancient boat of the people of the Rito. And so you know like, oh, this is probably something that was in the lore, dating back to Wind Waker. You have this epic Wind Temple thing. Then it starts playing the music of the Rito village from this game and you get the. Da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, with the full orchestra and the full choir that then kicks into the battle theme is Godlike. One of the best boss themes in the history of the Legend of Zelda. I would say that one theme. I have listened to over and over and over again since it came out. I will give you that. I will give you that one. But that's the thing. I look at it as like this music. This is something that I just want to hear in an orchestra. The other music I don't need to. This is like, no, this is orchestra music. That's what it is. And I don't sit there and just listen to orchestra music all the time. It's just not my jam. But you drop me in an orchestra. I'll be like, oh, dude, yeah, that's the Wind Temple. Oh, that's all there. It's all in there. It's just not something I choose to listen to. And so you hear it in person and then it then you just rush back the memories just like anything else. And yeah, I will admit the Wind Temple was the first temple I did. And that song was a banger. Yeah, and I think adding adding to what you mentioned to about the the build up, I guess both of you have mentioned this, but the build up in the temples with the music where as you're solving different parts of the temple, they start adding new things to the track. I think the one thing that is kind of a shame is that you don't hear the final version of each temple theme for very long because you just go right to the last day. Right. And then the boss has its own unique theme. So it kind of goes above, you know, you're at you just miss it kind of. So I would highly recommend people listen to the final built out versions of each of the temple themes because they are very good. And a lot of people probably skip them. Cause again, you just be lined to the boss after you've done the last thing that unlocks a portion of it. Yeah, you literally just go back and you're in the boss fight. That's it. You're going to think about stopping to listen. Yeah. I mean, there are, there were moments that I played and then people will know that watch my maybe beat the game live that there were some moments that I'm like, wait a second cause I'm just busy doing my thing, focusing on what I gotta do next. And I'm like, oh, wait a second. Oh, we got to stop. What is this? Oh, is that vice theme? Yeah. Did that just happen? What is going on? I was to me too, the way they incorporated that with the sword stuff, right? When they play price theme from Skyward Sword and you're like, oh no, see, they do know what they're doing here. This is a callback. This is something that they are bringing back. It is incorporated in the story. Yeah. No surprise. Ubiachi. No, not at all, of course. But I think that the ties to the music and the story are so clear in this one. And I think it's done with the intention of, again, connecting it for people who are longtime fans of the series of going, no, I know this might seem like a reboot. We are changing a lot of things. This is a new direction for the series, but believe me, the core and the history of Hyrule that we've built up to this point is not going anywhere. It's definitely still there. And we haven't forgotten our roots, which I think is integral. Exactly, right, right, right. I think the game, well, I guess probably wrapping this up. Yeah, oh yeah. Maybe I'll leave this as my closing thoughts and each of you to closing thoughts and then we'll do like a three, two, one. What's the score, maybe? Something like that. Cool, sounds good. Sounds good. My closing thoughts. It's really a masterpiece of a game, in my opinion. I felt blown away by Breath of the Wild and I called it early on, this is the game of the generation. This is the one game I could tell back in March of 17 that we're gonna be talking about for the next five, eight years. And I think it really was. I'm shocked and proud and pleased with Nintendo that I think that they built two games of the generation. They sort of started and ended with it. And Nintendo Switch still has some more life into it. We'll get games next year and beyond, but really you have this beginning and the end of this book, this chapter, these findings on a bookshelf, however you wanna call it, where they began and they ended with absolute bangers, what a treat. They've done this all generation, along with other games from Mario and Animal Crossing, just never giving us a drought. This is peak Nintendo, in my opinion, and hopefully just continue it. But specifically with Zelda, this is like one of those masterpiece games that if you could recommend someone new to gaming, as long as you could have a little bit of time, and maybe this is where I'll tie in controls, a little bit of time to the unexperienced or first time gamer, hey, use your left hand, typically, with this left thing right here to move your character around and this right one, this is how you navigate a camera. You could switch it inverted if you wish. This is the Y button to swing the sword. And once you get used to the controls, which I think are all fine, no complaints myself in terms of the overall controls, everything is snappy, it moves fast. I could use some gyro if I wish, we get a little bit of rumble in there. Maybe scrolling through items could be better, but even that's sort of solved because you could push items to most use or stronger, but perhaps a rolling wheel would be better, but if you could just spend some time, new gamer with the controls, you'll have one of the best games of all time on your hands and you will have several hundred hours of fun for your $70 investment. And you can't really say that about the majority of games out there. No disrespect, there are many, many awesome games, but this just nails it so much. I mean, the fact that we spent, I think most of our review, just on theorizing story means how much story is in it. That also kind of tells you how much is not, but how much you want to learn more of because it's that compelling. And I think Nintendo knows what they're doing. They could probably still find a way to further master the craft because you never want to leave an audience with no story and you have to tell it all yourself, but I think there is something to not giving you all because it creates these kinds of conversations and much like with the modern era of everything being social, everybody talking about each other's experiences, so too does this game work because back in the day, you would talk about, oh, I'm getting goosebumps because I'm remembering my Zelda lineage right here. You would all get to a point, about the same time in Ocarina of Time or the Wind Waker, you talk with friends and you move on and get to that point, boom. This game, there's so much more, there's so many layers of complexity, primarily with the gameplay, but with the story, there's enough that you love it, but there's not enough, maybe it's intentional that they want to create more of a social conversation behind it because that adds to the views, that adds to the fans are theorizing because it's gonna take us five years to make a new one. We know gameplay-wise, we're going to give people, oh, I'm telling you, it's happening again, guys. We know gameplay-wise, five years from now, people are still gonna be playing Tears of the Kingdom and making even crazier contraptions. Look at the beginning of Breath of the Wild and look six years later, we're like, wow, this is kind of cool. I could use Stasis and make it fly. Whoa, and now you could just do all this stuff times 10 fighting against the Lionel and never get hit once. You think that it's cool to make Metal Gear Rex now, just wait until five years from now. People are like, how did you make a whole city with, who knows, right? But gameplay-wise, you have that. If they gave everything story-wise, would the story last five years? Oh, there's only so much reading you could do. There's only so much voice acting that you could do. So by not giving you everything, sometimes less is more. And I think that it kind of fits, and I'm liking it more now because as we're having the conversation today and hear Roger talk about how it could go back in time and with Ganondorf this and they talking about how he was moved and that didn't happen before. Boom, boom, boom. And my own thoughts of like, there is a way to make it reboot. There is a way to make it work. Who else gets born from the Gerudo tribe? That's the one man every 100 years when it's not Ganondorf, was he born? It creates conversations. And I think with this kind of game, that's another reason why I think they nailed it. Game of the generation times two because it's gonna create a talking point story-wise for the next few years. And yeah, that's my closing thought before I get my score. Love the game. Pleasure talking with the two of you on it. To anyone who is a new time recipient of Zelda, it's a perfect entry point. Hop in, enjoy it. If you're an old school fan, I still think you're gonna enjoy it. If you're brand new to gaming and like literally never touched a game, if you just give it enough time because you're gonna have to learn this with anything, how to move analog sticks and what are all these buttons on the controller? Enough time, this is how you define what is gaming in the modern era of 2023. It nails sound, it gives you gameplay, it gives you music, it gives you tight controls. It's so polished that Nintendo delayed it about a year from when it was done to make sure things don't break on you when playing. And you wanna have as easy and barrier free of an entry point into gaming. And this game was the entry point for many people I think into Zelda, possibly into gaming. And for us old school folks that have been playing for three decades, really there's enough in it story-wise for you, gameplay-wise from you. We're trying to make you happier. We listen, Nintendo is listening. They made the bosses different than Breath of the Wild. They made the temples, dungeons different. So I think they'll continue to get better and better but yeah, love the game. Let me hear you guys' final thoughts. Look, it's pretty simple. It's my favorite game of all time. So I can nitpick a lot of things in it. Even like what Paul was saying about brand new gamers, in my personal opinion on brand new gamers you should start with Breath of the Wild. I think it's better to get a grasp of how dual stick controls and games work than jumping into a game that a few hours in just as you're still trying to get used to how you move suddenly you have ultra hand. Suddenly you have all these other things you're using the right stick for which are significantly more complex than just moving around the world. And I only say this because I got to witness this happen first time. My fiance doesn't play video games and she picked up Breath of the Wild for her very first time eight months ago and she was struggling. How do you do, this doesn't make any sense and she never put the game back down. She played it all the way up until Tears of the Kingdom came out and now she doesn't put Tears of the Kingdom down. She was struggling too in Tears of the Kingdom with some of the new mechanics and figuring out how to move things around. But I feel like for it could be a little too much I think if you're a brand new person to come into all of that at once it might be a little much but that's why I think Breath of the Wild for brand brand new gamers. If you're an experienced gamer doesn't have a problem moving around with twin sticks hop right into Tears of the Kingdom, no problem. But for brand new I would say maybe go with Breath of the Wild and that's not a criticism of Tears of the Kingdom. It's a direct sequel. To be fair, it's not meant to be the first that you touch. Is it? Can it be? Absolutely. But it was definitely meant to be a direct sequel and it builds on top of a lot of what Breath of the Wild did. This game, I didn't think Breath of the Wild could honestly be topped by a sequel. Sequels are usually letdowns in a lot of situations where there's movies, TV books, they're usually letdowns. There's always the exceptions and there's always the things where things get better before they get worse. Yeah, long running book series. You know maybe the first four are great but book five though just didn't quite hit. You see Game of Thrones, really, really great for many seasons and the last couple of seasons I don't know what happened. And well what happened is they ran on a book material so that's the real story of when that went down. When you only have the general outline of what's supposed to happen. Yeah, well you're missing all the good stuff. But that's the thing with this game is I didn't think it was possible to be better than what Breath of the Wild was. And Tears of the Kingdom somehow did it and I'm still sort of shocked that it did. That they listened. That they came up with this many inventive and creative ways to reminipulate a world we've already been in. That they took the criticisms of how the story was handled and made massive improvements with this story because I go back to the registry quote back in the day when he says, oh, we don't listen to anyone. You make a petition, we don't listen. Like this is pointless. Oh, you want to take credit, operation rainfall? Dude, we didn't even look at that thing. Didn't even matter to us. I mean he doesn't call out specific things like that but he does mention that no because someone asked him in an interview, hey, does Nintendo pay attention to fan say in any of these petitions? And he just straight up said, no, we don't pay attention to any of it. And now you have an interview today where Aonuma comes out and says, yeah, of course we're paying attention and we're listening. Well, it's very obvious that you are. And so while they might not listen to anyone in particular person, they get the general sense that okay, the dungeons really wasn't the way that we should have went with them. We need to go back to some of the more thematic things but we do like the way the dungeon, it's like we want to evolve the dungeons but we want to remember that, hey, you know what people didn't like that when we thought was such a great idea with the divine beasts, maybe they were a bit too samey and we kind of got our own way with how we were thinking about things. And I see that sort of throughout tears of the kingdom where they maybe had a lot of good ideas and what ultimately we got in the end was something that made, I've said this only one other time, it made Breath of the Wild almost feel like a tech demo and this is what it was meant to be in the end. And I didn't think that was possible. I don't think I've ever said that more to sequel to any game that it made the prior one feel like a tech demo when the prior one is already like one of the goats. So it's like, how does that happen? That's not, people are supposed to make one of the goats just feel like you were just a demo for what was to come. But that's really what it felt like. And yeah, I'm just gonna leave my thoughts on that because I could talk about this game forever. And I can hear what both of you said, obviously. It's like, I feel like the way you said it is perfect, right? Like that it does kind of make Breath of the Wild feel like a tech demo. And again, like I would highly recommend Breath of the Wild as an entry point for people that are new. But I think Breath of the Wild kind of revolutionary was revolutionary in terms of like what it did for the Zelda franchise, right? When you look at like the old format of Zelda with the dungeons and they always tried with Skyward Sword and all these other games to have the exploration and that feeling of solving a puzzle in a dungeon actually be part of the overworld. And I feel like this is the first time even more so than Breath of the Wild that I feel like that idea has actually been put into something concrete. I feel like Tears of the Kingdom is the most Zelda one feeling Zelda game since the original Legend of Zelda in terms of creativity, in terms of really feeling like you are thrown into this world. You could do whatever the heck you want, explore away and I feel like they've tried and tried and tried for 20, 30 years to get that same format and to get that feeling and they haven't quite done it. Not to say that those games are not also amazing and perfect and you know, things that have caused childhood memories and new fans for the series for years to come but it really does feel like this is the paradigm shift for the Legend of Zelda that it's needed. You could see it in gameplay, you see it in sales, you see it in critical reception. It is across the board objectively the biggest change and the biggest thing to happen to Zelda since the original Legend of Zelda. And I think I cannot imagine a world in which we are ever going back and just as you had brought up how it kind of makes Breath of the Wild feel like a tech demo, which is shocking considering how amazing that game already is. I am so intrigued to see what Zelda is going to look like five, 10 years from now and how people are going to look back at Tears of the Kingdom because again, I cannot imagine a world in which we go back from here. I think we're only going to move forward. They obviously put so much time and effort into building this Breath of the Wild Peers of the Kingdom engine and perfecting things and fixing things that people, you know, had as issues with that original game albeit dungeons, music, story, whatever. It enhances that original game which was already one of the best games of all time in literally every single way. And I'm right there with you. It is my all-time favorite Zelda game of all time and probably one of my favorite video games of all time period now, Tears of the Kingdom is a masterpiece. All right. We went this way, I guess we need to go this way with our scores and then Roger, you could start first. What is your score out of 10? I am giving the Legend of Zelda, Tears of the Kingdom a solid 10 out of 10. I am not going percentage marks on this one. I think we're starting things off. Obviously, if we do more review crews, these will be things that'll be nuanced and we'll go by percentage. This is going to become our opening of time where we set the bar so high, nothing ever gets. You're setting the bar so high that, yeah, everything now from here on out has to match up to Tears of the Kingdom. So I am setting the bar high, Tears of the Kingdom gets a 10 from me. All right, Nate, your score. I'm going to give it a 9.7. Perfect. Again, it's very hard for anything to be perfect. We brought up criticisms and I just have to give a smidge of play because what happens is something's better. Okay, that leaves me and I'm adding in my score ahead of time since I know what I'm going to give it. It is getting a 10 from me. This is one of my favorite games of all time. Is anything truly ever absolutely perfect? That's probably never going to happen in our lives or in the history of humankind or elsewhere, you know what I mean? But for how much simple satisfaction it gave and nailing everything, even with little things like, yeah, I could have scrolled more of this. I could have had a little more gather. They're so far under the overall hundreds of hours that I have received. And they're just a masterclass of gaming. And yeah, it's just one of my favorite titles ever. So it does get a 10 from me as well. That's a 29.7 out of 30. Made it easy for you. Which means that reviews, cruise, final score is actually a perfect 99 out of a hundred. Oh, beautiful. Dang. 9.9. There we go. I just think we needed that one point of reading. We needed that one percentage. I know, I'm glad you did it. Yeah, because again, I'm right there. What happens when something's more perfect? And I think I'm right there with you that I feel like, of course, no video game can be perfect. But I feel like in terms of how close a game can get to perfect, this is up there with me. Because I don't know about you guys, but for me, my 10s in my head would be like Super Metroid and Chrono Trigger. And it's there. It's there for me with those two. And I'm sure if you pick apart Chrono Trigger and Super Metroid, you're going to find things that you don't think are perfect in those games, too. But I think because of how I feel and replicating that feel to me is why I gave it the score that I did. But again, I agree. I'm glad you did the 9.7 to bring it down just a little bit. Because if we all would have done 10s and were to start over the perfect 10, where do you go from here? Yeah, I mean, that might happen. But it does speak to how good of a game it is. Because not one of us was like, yeah, it was kind of good. It was like a 7. Literally, I gave it a 9.7. It's my favorite game of all time. I told you I'm harsh, guys. I'm harsh. You might find people out there that don't like it. But I think it's going to be quite the outlier where I think that the majority of people that pick it up, maybe even 99.9% of the people or 99% of the people are going to love it or very much enjoy it in some capacity. But that's review crew's first review of the Legend of Zelda, Tears of the Kingdom. We officially gave it a 9.9. There is no contesting. That's why we each spoke our piece. We each gave our scores, not trying to unify our scores. But hey, to give it an average. And in the future, if we do a Pikmin 4 or whatever comes next, or future games, they could be different and it's going to be what it is. And that's going to be the honest truth. And maybe you will align yourself to one person's views a little bit more. But in this game, it was kind of unanimous that it was spectacular and masterpiece. And that 9.9 is a totally fine. I'm not mad at all. Like why are you saying that? I'm not at all. That's perfect. It's perfect. It was real. None of us changed anything of like, I thought it was. So, Nate, we're going to find you real quick. Oh, man, just type Nintendo Prime into YouTube at Ninty Prime. You see the little tag there? That also works. What is it? YouTube.com slash at Ninty Prime now or whatever the heck they're doing. I don't know. They change their URLs like every few years, it feels like. Or you can find me on Twitter, I guess. I'm sorry. X, I guess, with the same handle at Ninty Prime. Honestly, you just type in Nintendo Prime pretty much at any platform and it's probably me. So, come find me posting weird, wonky things on Instagram or some other weird place that I barely ever post. But when I do, you never know. Sometimes I'm pretending I'm trying to be meme-tastic and jump in the air, punch in the block, but then I'm wearing a Zelda costume when it makes those. Roger, you could tell folks where you're at. Oh, sure. Yeah, so I'm on YouTube. I'm on Twitch. I'm on pretty much every social media platform as RogersBase, R-O-G-E-R-S-B-A-S-E. I have the brand Unity. There's no official RogersBase, RogersBase underscore, whatever, it's RogersBase everywhere. So, yeah, come find me and thanks so much for having us on, Paul, greatly appreciate it. It was a lot of fun talking Zelda and I'm looking forward to seeing whatever the next review crew is gonna be. Yeah. Thank you all for watching. Thank you for joining me. You could find these videos on any one of these channels or on the review crew portion of YouTube. So look for that Paul Gale network. Look for Ninty Prime. Look for RogersBase. Look for review crew. You're gonna find it will be on Twitter as well. Maybe talk to you about conversations and you could get mad at us or not. Hopefully you'll be happy. All right, but thanks again for watching. This is review crew signing out. See you all next time. Take care, everybody. Later.