 It took me four tries over as many years to finally finish Breath of the Wild. Every time I started a new game, I just ended up getting bored. This year, though, and the months before the new game released, I pushed myself through and after like a dozen hours, I finally had enough stamina and enough hearts to make the game decent enough to keep playing. And after finishing Breath of the Wild, I could see what people love about it. And I could see all the interesting design aspects and I could even say it was a pretty good game. I enjoyed much of my time with it, but I also had a mountain of complaints about things that I think are just downright bad. After finishing Tears of the Kingdom last Saturday, I'm ready to make a video talking about how good this game is that almost certainly also has way more complaints than the universal 10 out of 10 treatment this game is getting. In many ways, Tears of the Kingdom feels like a direct response to many of the criticisms I had with Breath of the Wild. And it's those changes that make Tears of the Kingdom a much, much better game than the original. So I do think there's just a ton of stuff to praise with this game, but there's also an awful lot of stuff I really didn't like about it. So today, I'm going to go over everything that is great and everything that is just kind of terrible and try to figure out what I actually think about this game. After the logo. What a sequel should do. There's always the question of how much needs to change for a sequel to feel worthwhile. Doom Eternal is one of the greatest sequels ever because it keeps the core idea behind the first game, but fundamentally changes so much of the combat that it feels like an entirely different thing. But other great sequels like Neo 2, Dark Souls 3, The New God of War, are more like slightly improved iterations on the design. My floor for a sequel is that issues from the previous game are at least improved a little bit. The new AC games don't feel like anything that's been particularly improved along the way. There have been changes for sure, but for every small change that's positive, there's another that's negative. As I've said, I don't really think it's debatable that Breath of the Wild is a well made game, obviously. It's definitely not my cup of tea in many ways, but it is carefully designed with a ton of stuff to love. I actually didn't really plan to play Tears of the Kingdom, but when I saw some of the trailers with the fuse mechanic, I became intrigued. I have a ton of complaints, both big and small, with Breath of the Wild. But one of my biggest issues was that I found the game repetitive and simple, and I found the puzzles so barebones and generic that they felt like a huge waste of my time that I was forced to slog through in order to get enough stamina to make the game playable. With all that said, after I got enough stamina, I did enjoy Breath of the Wild enough to finish it, but there were just so many issues from the combat to shrines to exploration that it just kind of confuses me that it's considered one of the greatest games ever. All that's just to let you guys know where I'm coming from before we talk about Tears of the Kingdom. In my opinion, Breath of the Wild was a game with a really cool physics system held back by a massively empty map, boring easy puzzles, pointlessly slow exploration, and well below average combat. A good game, you know, may be a great game, but hardly an all-time masterpiece. Now, let's go over Tears of the Kingdom and talk about the ways it is significantly better than the first game, while still sharing a few of that game's big flaws and adding a couple more. We'll break this down into a few sections for the sake of clarity, seeing as how the map itself is one of this game's biggest improvements, let's start with exploration. It didn't take long to realize that one of my biggest issues with the first game has been solved in the sequel. Breath of the Wild had your standard open world towers like every other one of these games, you know, you climb it to unlock the map. While there was some basic gameplay involved with this, it was for the most part pretty boring stuff, on par with Far Cry 3, that kind of thing. You push up on the stick, and you get to the top, and then you look around, but the view was so restricted that you didn't find all that much from up there, and jumping down from the towers didn't get you much distance at all. Tears of the Kingdom vastly improves this. First of all, several have like little puzzles or mini-quests required to get inside of them, but more importantly, instead of slowly and annoyingly climbing the towers, you're blasted up into the air, and it's like really insanely high into the air. Not only is this just more interesting, it's one of the biggest examples of an important change between the two games. The first game, for all of its absurd size, was actually really empty. Tears of the Kingdom is not empty. In fact, it's absurdly packed with so much shit it's overwhelming. People have pushed back in the comments sometimes on my repeated complaints about how boring Breath of the Wild can be, but it's a simple fact, man, that you spend like 95% of your time walking up and down hills in that game. This is no longer a problem. I can't stress enough how frictionless the exploration is in this game. The simple change of launching players 40 miles into the air from the towers totally changes the exploration. In the first game, the glider is just a slow way to fall. In Tears of the Kingdom, the glider is now seriously the primary way you move across the world. No matter where you're going, it is always easiest to just go to a tower and launch yourself up. It just so happens that I did the Rito Village dungeon first, and the ability that gives you a gust of wind is another one of the hugely impactful changes to this game. As you fall, you can spot multiple shrines and tag them, and often you can just coast on over to them. In fact, you can often launch yourself from one tower all the way over to the next tower, which like massively decreases the amount of pointless wandering. And the exploration itself is far more rewarding because you're almost never just walking for minutes in between places. In the first game, you'll see something from the top of the tower and then spend like 5 minutes slowly walking to that spot with literally nothing happening in between. In Tears of the Kingdom, you can't walk 90 seconds without finding something. A cave or a world boss or a different shrine. And then there's the underground areas that are just packed with enemies and resources. Another thing that annoyed the crap out of me in Breath of the Wild was the ridiculous amount of rain. All of Hyrule was like living in Seattle. There's still rain in this game, but you can now make potions to mitigate the slipping and you'll get some anti-slip armor and it just like rains way less often outside of a couple of zones. It's still annoying to shit when it happens, but it's way less common. All of these changes, big and small, add up to a game where exploring the map is actually fun in a way, to me, the first game simply was not. It's faster, it's more efficient, and there's easily three times as much stuff to do in the world. It's so much more dense than the first game, I almost always ended up sidetracked for my original destination. And to me, that is the sign of a good open world game. This is what Elden Ring did so well. When I'm just moving from one waypoint to another, that big ass map isn't gameplay. It's just an annoying time waster in between actual gameplay. Tears of the Kingdom is a tremendous improvement over the first game when it comes to exploration and that's important because that's what these games do best. Shines and Dungeons. Probably my biggest disappointment with Breath of the Wild is how simple all of the Shines are. While a couple had interesting puzzles, the vast majority were almost comically short, little puzzles that felt like a massive waste of time. One of the best ways to demonstrate this is that in the first game, I ended up only getting about 9 hearts and 2 rings of stamina before just beginning the game because the Shines were basically a chore I was required to complete to be able to climb more than 10 feet and not be one shot killed by blue enemies. It wasn't something I wanted to do, it was something I had to do to be able to beat the game. Then the four Divine Beasts ranged from like really good to not so good while also being extremely short. And the Divine Beasts boss fights were so easy and simple it almost felt like they were barely bosses at all. A couple of them I beat and was like oh really that's it, okay that's a huge chunk of the game that felt like massive downgrades from every previous Zelda game. I've been playing Zelda since the very first one released, I got that when it came out and the puzzles and Shines and Breath of the Wild felt like massive downgrades from every previous Zelda game. Now on this front, I think it is such a massive improvement that it is hard to even comprehend. Let's start with the Shines. In Tears of the Kingdom I fully upgraded my stamina and ended the game with something like 25 hearts because A, the Shines are way easier to find because of how the map towers work and more importantly, B, the Shines themselves are actually enjoyable. Instead of being tiny little rooms with obvious and rigidly prescribed solutions, the Shines and Tears are often quite big featuring multiple puzzles in each one. And because I almost created freedom as present in the skills that Tears gives you, I found myself consistently solving puzzles in ways the game did not seem to intend. They were simultaneously more challenging and less frustrating because they didn't revolve around figuring out exactly how the developers intended you to solve them. Instead, you're given this ridiculously huge set of tools and allowed to just make your own solution. And thank God there are no motion control puzzles in this game which is great because those are so horrendously terrible and motion controls just need to stop being a thing, please they are awful. They are just awful. Then the Sage dungeons are just light years better than the Divine Beasts. Each one has a lengthy approach that serves as its own navigation and combat puzzle and the dungeons themselves fully commit to the game's core design idea of giving you a bunch of tools and letting you figure it out. They're so free-form, many of them feel like they literally do not have an intended solution at all and the bosses are just massively better as well. They're all interesting set piece fights with complex mechanics and really great themes. Every single one is memorable. I played Breath of the Wild like a month before this game and I don't even remember any of the Ganon fights. They're that mediocre. I'll remember the boss fights here for a long time because they're that memorable. You're not just like fighting Ganon four times. You're fighting cool creatures that thematically fit in a way. Breath of the Wild's boss fights just don't. A tremendous improvement in every way and legitimately excellent stuff. Totally unique. The one thing that I genuinely loved about Breath of the Wild was its amazing physics interactions. I accidentally discovered that you can make fire choo-choo jelly by dropping regular choo-choo jelly near a fire. When that happened the first time, I was like, oh, holy shit. I had the same reaction the first time I accidentally lit the grass on fire all around me or when I saw a monster get struck by lightning or when a monster froze himself by accidentally killing an ice enemy when trying to hit me. Those moments elevated Breath of the Wild from yet another boring big-ass open world game into something totally unique. The issue is you still spent like 95% of your time walking around a boring open world doing boring puzzles. Tears of the Kingdom takes those brilliant moments of physics interactions, which are easily the very best thing about the first game and designs the entire experience around them. Tears of the Kingdom makes Breath of the Wild look like an early prototype. Tears of the Kingdom is literally physics interaction, the game. And it all works preposterously well. So well it is like an indictment of every other development studio. How the hell would these people make a game where almost every single object interacts with every single other object and the physics system and the player has full control of all these things. And yet in over 100 hours, I don't think I encountered a single bug. The game is absurdly polished aside from its framerate. But even there, it's amazing. This shit runs on switch at all. Diffuse mechanic is totally transformative in general as a gameplay mechanic. It has some flaws related to the way the menus work. But we'll get to that later. Simply from the mechanics itself, it's pretty much like nothing else in games. The puzzle and exploration implications for being able to take any objects and fuse them together is just amazing. Vehicle building is pretty interesting and the battery upgrades add an entirely different part to progression. But it's actually what you can do with arrows that had the biggest impact on the game for me. While we'll talk about the actual combat soon, the one thing about it that's legitimately great is using the fuse mechanic on arrows. Every item can be added to an arrow to add damage. But a shockingly huge variety of items have actual interactions. And all those interactions makes the resource gathering actually useful instead of a pointless waste of time. The water arrow clears a waste slime. Ice arrows freeze water. Fire arrows and pine cones makes an updraft to get up into the air. Wings increases range. Eyeballs guaranteeing crits. It's just like an amazing system. There's just so many more too. And the weapon fusing system makes monster parts far more valuable and actually incentivizes killing enemies. There was like literally no point to killing enemies in the first game. You could sell their parts, but money was already easy to come by. And you didn't even need it as you could find everything in the world. And combat was not good enough to be worth doing on its own. But now you improve your weapons not by progressing further into the game and waiting for better things to drop. Instead, you make high powered weapons by killing high powered enemies. As a result, killing strong enemies is always worth your time. In Breath of the Wild, you were seriously hurting yourself by fighting. Anytime you fought higher tier enemies, you came out of it with less resources than when you went in. That is totally solid tier because higher tier enemies drop higher tier parts to make your weapons better. And the toughest enemies almost always drop multiple parts. What this all adds up to is that Tears of the Kingdom improves on most of my biggest complaints with the first game. Breath of the Wild's best systems are massively improved as the map and physics and freeform exploration is wildly better. Its shrines are massively better. The dungeons are massively better. As a result, the game is just tremendously better than the first one. And that is awesome. It does not, however, mean that Tears of the Kingdom is a perfect masterpiece because there are several things the game does as poorly as the first game, such as combat. It's bad. It's just bad. Now it's time to start the bitching, but it's important you understand that the mountain of bitching you are about to hear does not negate the legitimately amazing stuff this game does, but it does matter. And it does impact the overall quality of the game. No modern game does everything perfectly, aside from Doom Eternal and Sekiro, obviously, but every other game aside from those two does have flaws. I don't need to combat in games to be great. All right, the new Star Wars game is really very good, even though the combat is only decent. The same goes for the last of us. Those games have a bunch of other things going for them, just like Tears of the Kingdom does. But I have to say, I find the combat and Tears of the Kingdom to be extremely poorly done, just on a basic design level. It does improve on the combat from the first game in several ways, but not enough and not in the places that matter most. One of the biggest problems with the first game is the pitiful enemy and encounter variety, and Tears has improved on that, which is appreciated. But with a system that is so limited, even more enemies would have been better. The one place that the game has really improved the combat is archery, but the melee combat that makes up the vast majority of the fighting has serious issues. This is an entire systems problem from the way that Link controls to the way the enemy movesets work. If there's one thing I'd hoped they would have really iterated on from the first game, it was this. But sadly, the melee combat is basically unchanged. Link has only a few things he can do in combat and all of them have problems. Link can do an attack. He can do a charge attack. He can block, he can parry, and he can dodge. The only one of these mechanics that actually works is the standard attack. Link's charged melee takes such an absurd amount of time to pull off and Link can stagger it out of any action by any attack. So it's basically never worth it to even bother trying it. Link's blocking works fine enough, but any enemy that's actually dangerous enough to bother blocking is usually able to break your stance and destroy your shields in one or two hits. Link's dodge and perfect dodge is just like broken. The controls themselves are clunky and sticky and the actual perfect dodge window seems like weirdly random. After over a hundred hours and playing the first game, I still cannot figure out exactly what the game requires to consistently get a perfect dodge. And while parrying is fun, the reward isn't even worth the effort. This isn't Dark Souls where a parry is rewarded with a critical strike. A parry staggers an enemy, sure, but hitting an enemy also staggers them. Blocking an enemy staggers them, hitting them with an arrow staggers them. So while I parried every so often just for fun or against bosses, it's actually basically another fairly pointless skill. All of this is made so much worse because the enemies in the game have some of the most poorly designed move sets you will ever see. Dodging and parrying are useless because the vast majority of enemies literally stand in front of you dancing. They attack so rarely that you'll stand there for like five or ten seconds waiting for them to attack so you can dodge. But you quickly realize there's no reason to do that when you can just mash the attack button to hit them instead. In fact, you can just spam attack and lock the enemies into a never ending loop of knockdowns. No single normal enemy is even close to a threat. The only time the combat is a threat is when a whole bunch of enemies are attacking you at once. But here, again, the way the game works means you're always better off just running around in a circle, mashing the button. If it's pointless to dodge or parry against single enemies because it's more efficient to just mash the button and it's pointless to dodge or parry against multiple enemies because you'll be swarmed with attacks while you sit there waiting an eternity for an enemy to attack then the combat always just devolves into button mashing. Listen, man, I don't need every game to be hard and I don't need every melee combat system to be Neo or Sekiro. But this game would be massively improved with simple iframes on dodge instead of the barely functional system that is here. And the game would be far better having enemies attack way more often and having that be how the game pushes difficulty instead of the difficulty being how many monsters the game can cram into an encounter to turn it into a massive clusterfuck. And that is how combat works. You'll start with some archery stuff, but soon enough you'll just run around mashing attacks to stun lock one enemy to death and then do that over and over to each enemy in a row. And this is a great example of the difference between difficult and frustrating. Tears of the Kingdom's combat is ridiculously easy. It is basically impossible to die once you get more than five hearts. And yet it is frustrating as hell because even though nothing can kill you, you'll always take a bunch of hits still because there's no benefit to patience and no point in dodging. And you're always better off just gritting your teeth and taking the hits. And every fight against multiple enemies is both a certain victory and also an annoying slog. But you know what? So what, right? You have access to nearly infinite amounts of healing, which incidentally brings us to what I consider to be both of the game's greatest flaws. How are the controls like this? Both of the new Zelda games have an enviable amount of things the player has to deal with. There's excellent exploration puzzles, and then there's combat. There's an absurdly complicated cooking system that ties into the game's gathering system, which ties into the game's exploration system, which also ties into mitigating the game's status effects system. That's amazing. The fact that the game has light survival systems that includes cold and heat and stuff like that is really cool. The fact that the exploration requires stamina and battery power means progression is heavily tied to exploration, which is awesome. And the fact that you heal using food means that rewards for exploration are always important. So it sounds like all of these systems are nearly perfect. Aside from suffering from one critical flaw, almost every single problem you encounter in both of these games has the same solution. Open the menu. Cold. Open the menu. Hot. Open the menu. Add a stamina menu, health menu, battery menu. You end up fiddling in menus, a seriously annoying amount of time. Tears of the Kingdom can be so impressively designed, man. You constantly find yourself thinking, wow, how come this feels so much more ambitious than anything else? But then you take damage and you find yourself literally having to pause the game, open the menu, sort the total mess that is this game's UI, and then eat to heal and then unpause the game and keep going. I don't think it's possible to even exaggerate how insanely terrible that is. Now you might be thinking, OK, smart guy, how do you propose to fix that? Well, first of all, how about something super simple like the food menu defaults to being sorted? Why do I need to resort the menu every single time I open it? Ask yourself this, man, why would you ever want the food menu to not be sorted? Like, why the hell would I ever be like actually game? I would prefer all the food to be randomly arranged if you don't mind. In fact, why don't we just leave it like that? And I'll kind of just sort it every so often as needed. Like, how can the game be so insanely well designed here? And then this stupidly designed here. But that's not even a real solution, actually. That is a garbage band aid. How about this? See this radio menu here? See, see how could easily have a few more things on it. And while we're at it, why is the map on the radio menu? Why is the camera on it? Dude, the map opens when you press select. Why would I ever need to open it with the radio dial? In fact, having it there is literally an inconvenience as the select button is one press to open. And the radio menu is one press, then aim, then press again to open. So there's no reason to ever open the map with the radio menu. Why is it there? Now, imagine if where the fucking map selection is, I can instead have only food without other effects. So the radio dial now heals, which would vastly, vastly improve the combat just by itself without even trying to fix all of the other issues that games combat has. I mean, one of the best ways I can explain it is this. Listen, man, you will constantly need to attach it to your arrows. And this is one of the game's very best features. This is like downright genius. OK, this arrow fusing mechanic, it's amazing. It is insane and puts like the entire triple A industry to shame with how inventive and creative and fun this fuse mechanic system with the arrows is. So, you know, you'll be using this system a lot. And that looks like this. Right now, someone is about to type, you can sort that menu, bro. Yeah, I know. But what I don't know is what that even does. It feels almost random. How could a development team this amazing go through the entire development and nobody said, hey, guys, why don't we let the player set five items as favorites in this menu? And those will always be the first five items to attach to arrows. I mean, I thought of that like 15 minutes into the game. So what the hell? Then there's the total disaster that is the sage powers. Listen, these things are actually quite useful. The one that gives you the gust of air is so important that I feel legitimately bad for anyone who didn't get lucky and go there first like I did. Then the lightning and rock ones are good for both combat and mining. The water dudes are useless pieces, but 75 percent of those abilities are just fantastic design that are not only amazing gameplay additions that give the combat much needed variety and flair. They're also crucial quality of life upgrades. They're basically perfect, aside from being so poorly implemented that they frustrate the shit out of me all the time. Why is the button that picks shit up the same as the button that tells this fucker here to blow things away? I can't tell you how many times this little turd blew items I was picking up off of a cliff. How on earth did they arrive at the idea that you need to run up to these idiots and talk to them to use the skills? There was no other idea. Why aren't they on the radio menu or say, hold radio menu and then D pad over once or any number of button combos that would have worked like L, B and X or whatever, man. It's like absurdly goofy to run in circles trying to talk to these morons in a fight. I can't tell you how many times I'd want to use one of these abilities in combat only to find them literally running away from me. Or I try to use one only for another moron to get in the way, usually the water idiot. It's so catastrophically bad, it's actually kind of funny. I mean, this shit is like indefensively garbage as a piece of design. Such garbage that it takes something that's pure genius and makes an annoying piece of shit. Again, the obvious solution here is to hold the radio menu button and then D pad over to the skills. I mean, it's obvious. Amazing that this is the way it is that you have to walk up to these people and talk to them. That's so crazily stupid. And this hilariously terrible control scheme just reinforces a core problem with the game, which is that the controls are horrendous. And Nintendo thinks they're so damn smart that you're not allowed to remap the buttons. Listen, I know this is how Japanese games used to be. I've been playing games for a long time. I'm an old dude who once owned a 2600 as a kid. But check it out, man, Nintendo has lost. The bottom face button is except in menus. And the right face button is go back in literally 99.99999 percent of games. This is how it works, but not here. Why? Why do I have to completely relearn several decades of muscle memory for just this game? What is gained by doing things differently than everyone else? Why is the jump button so stupidly mapped? Why isn't sprint on the left stick like every other fucking game in the world? Listen, man, you can keep your objectively terrible and stupid controls scheme if you want. How about I am permitted to realize your scheme is trash and change it to the standard control scheme used in every game for the last 30 years? A bunch of this UI and UX shit is straight up hostile to the player. Does it totally ruin the game? No, of course not. But does it fucking improve the game? Clearly and obviously not. It's just a pointless piece of friction and frustration that I must overcome again and again and again for literally zero benefit. It is a design that has no benefit. At very best, it's no issue for a player. At worst, it pisses me off every 40 seconds for 80 hours. Why? And as with every game ever, I refuse to continent's people who ever defend developers who do not allow button remapping. There is quite literally no defense for it at all. No legitimate argument can possibly be made for the position that the player should not have the core basic functionality of remapping all control inputs. If you're afraid that some seven year old would get confused, bury it deep in the menus, but that shit doesn't fly either, frankly, because these aren't kids games anymore. To be honest, they never really were. Right from the first game, you had to be old enough to have some patience to play these things. And anyone who can't be trusted with the ability to remap buttons can't be trusted to solve puzzles. Fucking a man, I cannot overstate how terrible the user experience is in this game. Are you trying to waste my time? This is the last thing we'll go over. Tears of the Kingdom is ridiculously huge. It is just absurdly packed with super high quality content. The overworld is like stuffed with great shit. Then there's the Sky Island, which is like 20 hours of amazing stuff. Then there's the underworld. I played this game, I don't know, like probably close to 100 hours. And I swear to God, I ended up exploring like 30% of the underground area. This game demands a tremendous investment in time. And you can't even play other games at the same time because you need to lock in on the crazy controls. I went back to Jedi Survivor a few times and it took like half an hour just to remember which button closes the menus. Thanks, Nintendo. What I'm saying is that a game that demands so much time and has so much amazing stuff really, really doesn't then need to waste a bunch of my time. But Tears does, in fact, waste so much of your time. I cannot believe how terrible the dialogue system is here. Why do I have to slowly go through like five dialogue boxes for a single paragraph? Why is it so slow to take a horse out? Why does the horse guy give me the same useless tutorials about horses even 80 hours into the game? That kind of shit is everywhere. All of the shrines have you walk up and press a button. Then there's a little cutscene. Then you walk into the door. Then there's a loading screen. Then there's a little cutscene. Each one of those hundred plus shrines you will do will waste like seven seconds of your time as you mash the button to skip the pointless watch link. Slowly walk in cutscene. Every tower demands you watch the same cutscene of Link being hooked up to the contraption. Every conversation takes like five times longer than it needs to, which leaves you mashing the skip button over and over. Why isn't the dialogue box just bigger so I don't need to skip each individual line of dialogue rather than waiting for it to slowly scroll out? You cook so much food in this game and the cutscene will need to be skipped several hundred times throughout this game. Hundreds of times. You'll have to wait for the pop-up to show you what you've cooked. Then press B to dismiss it. Like five hundred times you have to do that. Why? At the end of every single shrine, you walk up and have to skip a cutscene, then wait for the pop-up to very slowly appear, then dismiss that, then skip the next cutscene. Answer me this, man. Is there even one person in the universe who wants to watch the post-triang cutscene more than once? Now, explain to me if anyone on Earth wants to watch this post-triang cutscene for the hundred and thirty seconds time. Why is it even here? Yes, you can skip this shit, but it's still too slow and it's constantly left me feeling frustrated mashing the button to skip something that it is patently obvious shouldn't even exist at all. This ethos is everywhere in the game. And once you start noticing it, it just like builds up on your shoulders. A tremendous weight of frustration. Every NPC conversation is so painfully and pointlessly slow. Every time you level up and buy a heart is so slow. Every shrine cutscene is so fucking slow. Breath of the Wild story is pure garbage. It barely exists and the game literally asked you to fucking randomly stumble on 12 spots to get even that story. Tears of the Kingdom actually has a very good story in there. And it puts a big glowing picture on the ground to let you know where it is. Awesome. But then you have to like slow walk over the entire area to find one tiny pool that only appears when you walk near it. Why? How is that interesting? Walking like 500 yards slowly to try and find one spot. I just, I mean, that's horrendous man. Why? And while the story is decent, it leaves massive holes that I would have liked filled in. And why on earth is it told out of order? The second cutscene I got was Ganon killing the Queen. I literally saw that one before I saw almost anything else. It kind of hurts the pace of a story when a main character dies in the second cutscene before you even see them speak. Surely it would have been better to have the 12 story cutscenes be in order, right? This is in Pulp Fiction or Memento, man, Zelda. It's a very simple, basic story with high quality cutscenes told out of order for no reason at all. It kills it. That's just a terrible decision that I don't even understand. Why would you actually have a decent story but ruin it by having the player stumble upon it out of order? Shouldn't the writers decide what order I get the story rather than the blind luck of where I go first? It's one of the dumbest progression decisions I've ever seen. Speaking of which, the progression in Tears of the Kingdom is eventually masterful in its ability to smooth out the game. But even there, there are issues. At the start of this game, you can sprint a shit new knot for two and a half seconds before waiting for two and a half seconds to get your stamina back. It takes hours to make the game feel playable. I lived with a bunch of one hit kills because getting extra stamina is mandatory for making this game even tolerable. Once you get that second ring of stamina, the progression is basically perfect. But holy hell, man, that first 10 hours are miserable. I would prefer the game's default stamina to be two rings because, my God, it is so boring and annoying to only be able to sprint for two seconds and climb like 10 feet. And another thing, Tears is insanely freeform. While you get much better direction in this game than the annoying zero hand holding you get in the first one, I still find it annoying that you can end up in weird situations where you get the parry tutorial like 55 hours in. I went directly to Rito, just, you know, randomly. I just went that way. And I ended up doing all the game's basic tutorial type shrines like dozens of hours in, which then feels like a huge waste of my time. Surely actually assigning the shrines chronologically is a better idea, right? Wouldn't it be better to make certain that the first five shrines are the combat tutorials or make it so an early quest directs you to those or don't have the tutorials in the shrines? I mean, I don't want to have to slog through extremely simple shrines like that 80 hours in. I do understand that this creates all sorts of different follow on issues in the design, but this game often feels strangely balanced depending on which direction you happen to walk first. I don't know, that's probably the least of my issues. But still, it's a thing and there's a bunch of other stuff like that. All this is to say the tears of the kingdom is an impressive game. I enjoyed it, but it also has a mountain of shit that grates on me. I almost broke my thumb mashing the skip button every time a pointless cutscene of Link walking played and every NPC had me grating my teeth being like Jesus Christ. Yes, I know how the fucking horse works, asshole. I'm about to fight the final boss, dude. Wrap it up. So here's the bottom line. I don't make these videos to convince any of you to change your mind. I make these videos to give my opinion and then to talk to people in the comments. I love it when I have an unpopular opinion and then I find that a bunch of other people feel that way too. And I also love it when people disagree with me and point out a mistake I made. This whole essay isn't trying to convince anyone that tears of the kingdom is a bad game. Even if it was, I wouldn't be able to do that, but the game is not. In fact, it's one of the most impressive things you'll ever play. It's just light years better than the first game. It vastly improves exploration, puzzles, dungeons, sidequests, and even the combat, while still pretty terrible, is slightly less terrible, slightly. But again, it just kind of annoys me that none of these flaws are even mentioned anywhere. Like, you'd think that this game was absolutely perfect and could not be improved by the way it's written about. But the combat is bad. The NPC Tylog is both bad and terribly implemented. The UI and quality of life stuff is miserably bad. The control mapping is terrible and they won't let you fucking change it, which is horrendous. There's an awful lot of shit here that could be improved a lot. Just even having average melee combat would make this game so much better. So Tears of the Kingdom is definitely an amazing game full of innovative design. It improves an awful lot of stuff, but it also suffers from baffling issues at its core. I just can't believe the slowest shit horse asshole is telling me how to ride for the 50th time in hour 100. I can't believe it. I don't understand how that's a thing and why it seems like I'm the only person in the world pissed off about it. I don't understand. No one else has annoyed at that. No one else is like, come on, dude. Give me my fucking horse. Are none of you people even slightly annoyed at the horse asshole? I refuse to believe it. Surely I'm not the only inpatient person in the world. I hate this guy, man. I mean, he's just the worst. All right, I don't know what I'll do next, but I do have a bunch of thoughts about Jedi Survivor and I'll be playing Diablo, although there's no way in hell I'm giving Blizzard $20 to play the game three days early. Fuck off, Blizzard. Thanks for coming. See you next time. Bye.