The Ringer-Verse - ‘The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom’ Instant Reactions

Episode Date: May 15, 2023

Hyrule Warriors! Ben Lindbergh, Justin Charity, and Matt James are gliding into the Ringer-Verse feed with a mostly spoiler-free preview of the latest 'Zelda' installment, ‘Tears of the Kingdom’ (0:00). After breaking down their histories of 'Zelda' gameplay, the trio dish out their expectations and their first reactions (10:00) before noting the differences from and expansions of ‘Breath of the Wild’ (15:30), plus much more. Hosts: Ben Lindbergh, Justin Charity, and Matt James Producer: Devon Renaldo Additional Supervision: Arjuna Ramgopal Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Their new smoothing wireless bra has four-way stretch fabric for all over smoothing, soft lightly lined cups for a natural shape, and no wire comfort that lasts all day. All over smooth, all-day comfort, vanity fair lingerie. Find yours at Target today. Hello and welcome into the ringerverse. The ringer's Nexus podcast feed for all things fandom. I am Ben Lindberg, a senior editor at The Ringer, and I will be your hero of podcast time today,

along with the two sages by my side. The first companion lending me his powers is Ringer's senior staff writer Justin Charity, who is excited for Tears of the Kingdom because it gives him a way to pass the time until he's united with his true love, Street Fighter 6. Welcome.

We're honest on this podcast, but yeah. I'm glad to do here. Behind the scenes, we're airing all the dirty wander here. We're also joined by Ringer Deputy Art Lead, Matt James, whose joy upon downloading Zelda on Friday morning was tempered only by his sadness about the heat eliminating his Nix on Friday night. Some real highs and lows for you on Friday, Matt, much like the layout of Hyrule. They both felt inevitable to me.

I was prepared for both, so. Yeah, you had a good run, right? The Nicks had a good run, and we're having a great run with this game. So about five months ago, the three of us got together on this feed to discuss the best video games of 2022. Today, we are talking about probably the leader in the clubhouse for the best video game of 2023. Nintendo's The Legend of Zelda, Tears of the Kingdom. A game, this ginormous cannot be contained in one episode unless it's house of our length. So we're going to do two tiers of the kingdom pods.

Here's the situation. We didn't have early access to this game. So we got our grubby hands on it at the same time as everyone else. No media elites over here, just men and gamers of the people. So even if we had not slept or bathed, and to be honest, I didn't do a ton of either. There have not been enough hours between when the game came out and when we're recording for us to have seen more than a fraction of what Tears of the Kingdom has to offer. And I know some speed runners have beaten it in an hour and a half, but we are neither that good at the game nor in a great rush. So I think this game is meant to be played by most people at a leisurely pace.

So today we're going to talk about it in a big picture way. We'll give you our impression so far. We'll discuss the larger reception, our hopes for the rest of the game. You can consider this the great Sky Island or the great plateau of podcasts. We're just going to ease you in and help you get you bearings. And at the end of this month, we'll be back to talk about the game in full. So that's when we'll focus on specific moments and dive into the depths of the story and figure out where this would rank amongst us.

the games and look forward to the future of the franchise. For now, though, we're still in the semi-early stages. So if you're about to start playing or you're playing now, we are right there with you. And we can't and won't spoil anything beyond the basic stuff you've seen in trailers or read in previews and reviews and reviews. And one of the joys of playing Tears of the Kingdom and Breath of Wild is not knowing what will happen next. But here at the Ring ofverse, we do like to tell you what's coming. So I will let you know that the Midnight Boys will be back on Wednesday. and House of Our will bring us their spring slash summer edition of the height meter on Friday. And then on May 31st, that's when you can expect our second episode on Tears of the Kingdom to drop.

But let's start at the beginning. And I can't really ask how far you guys have gotten because we're talking about Tears of the Kingdom here. So we could have gone in completely different directions. And you could have happily played all weekend without getting anywhere, quote unquote, from a story perspective. but just to give people a brief sense of where we are and what we've seen, I've finished the tutorial area. I went northeast to Rito Village. I did the Wind Temple.

Then I did the first of the Robbie quests in the depths. And then I went southeast to check out Kakarika Village and the ruins there with obviously a lot of detours above and below ground along the way. So I feel like I've gotten a good sampler. But I'm just sort of scratching the surface literally. Justin, what's your adventure log looking like so far? Well, I went, I think you mean northwest. The Rito, isn't Rito Village Northwest? Yes.

I did it. I did the main thrust in the northwest. And I am currently in the Southwest, you know, the part of the map where your map stops working and you're in sandstorms constantly. And it's either quote unquote unbearably hot or unbearably cold, depending on the time of day. Yes, right, exactly. And we've all done tons of wondering around it, as you can tell. by my Northeast Northwest grew up.

My sense of direction, not necessarily the best. So, Matt, where have you been? Yeah, it's all the lost woods out there, right? Yeah. I also went northwest. I am currently in the Wind Temple, but I did a ton of exploring. I did a lot of shrine hunting,

trying to get them hearts up before venturing too far out into the main story. Yeah. So I don't know about you two, but for me, this weekend was just idyllic. just on Thursday, there's this avalanche of rapturous reviews on Friday. The game comes out. My daughter's daycare had a parent's night on Friday, which is like, hey, if you want, we'll keep the kid a little late in case mom and dad want to take a nap or get dinner or, I don't know, have sex or something. My wife were like, hell yes, like, let's start Zelda. So yeah, we chose Zelda over our childhood and also sex, I suppose.

But it was great because that day I felt like a kid again instead of someone who has a kid. And I might have taken time off for work if I wasn't kind of playing Zelda for work. So that worked out as a commensum. I can relate to that. When Winwaker came out, I lost three days of my life entirely. Nobody saw me. Yeah. And it's always a conundrum if you're playing with a partner, just that each of us is playing with our wife.

right? And I think the Switch can be a real relationship preserver if you're playing different games on different consoles or you're one of you's playing something, one of you's watching something. And so you don't need to hog the TV. You can have the small screen and the big screen. But if you both play Switch and you both play Zelda, that's a bit of an issue. So we've kind of been trading off and just like looking at each other enviously as we watch the other play so far. How are you handling that? Well, it's interesting you say that because that's my relationship with Zelda. Actually, brother of the while, it was the first Zelda game I ever played, right? Yeah. And I've otherwise, like, I remember growing up, I had a best friend who played Ocaryana of Time, but I just never played it. I watched him play it. And then I recently watched my wife play both Ocarina of Time and Skyward Sword on the Switch.

So yeah, it's like I'm actually this sort of relationship goals, Zelda experience is kind of just, That's the default experience for me of Zelda. Yeah, that's so interesting because I have for many generations of consoles, it's been very much a solo thing for me. But now that you bring that up, I remember my actual, my first experience with Zelda was back on the Nintendo Entertainment System, and it was with my dad. My dad brought the gold cartridge home from a coworker one day and said,

hey, we should check this out. And we sort of played through the whole thing together. He was an architect and he was drawing out all the maps of the world. So my history of it actually starts in that place of a very shared, very cherished experience of playing with someone else and discovering together. My wife wants nothing more than to play Wind Waker on Switch. That's all she wants in this world. Just let us do it, Nintendo. Don't drive me to illegality.

You're going to make me download emulators and ROMs and then you're going to sue me for all I'm worth and you're going to just throw me in prison. and just make these games available for us. I guess this is the wrong time to complain because they just made a great Zelda game available for us. So I think there's nothing like the release of a gigantic game with this amount of hype and praise. I can't comp it to anything else in entertainment because it's not like going to the theater for a blockbuster movie

or sitting down on Sunday to watch HBO or even cracking open a book you can't wait to read because the investment and the return on investment in terms of time are so much greater. So when you boot this thing up, you willingly and enthusiastically surrender a lot of your life. I mean, whether it's 50 hours or 100 hours or 200 hours, it's like, okay, for the next few weeks or months or however long it lasts, I just live in Hyrule now almost as much as I live in real life. Maybe it's analogous to starting an entire TV or book series after the whole thing is out there and available to be binge. But it's more commutable than that with a new game.

Because in that kind of case, the conversation has moved on, whereas in this case, it feels like everyone is excited about Zelda and playing Zelda and talking about Zelda and discovering Zelda at the same time. I mean, Breath of the Wild was an instant classic, of course, and has gone on to sell 30 million copies. But it was a launch game for Switch. We were trying to figure out where we could get a Switch, right? Yeah, yeah.

The Manhattan Kingdom. Exactly, right. Just descended to the depths of the caves to try to find a switch. And Wii U was a flop, right? So even though that game was great, not everyone was playing it on day one. A lot of us were looking from the outside, you know, with our faces pressed up against the glass wanting to be played. Whereas now there are, what, 125 million switches sold. So this whole weekend felt like a Zelda holiday.

I mean, my timeline was full of people torturing Korox. and just building bombers and occasionally doing some non-sadistic stuff too. But it felt like we were all kind of learning the lay of the land together. So in that old school, schoolyard spirit, pre-internet kind of ethos of comparing notes on a game as we go, could you guys each just give me your most memorable experience so far, especially if it's something unplanned, like some discovery you stumbled across, a physics fail or a surprising solution to a problem. Something just kind of made you go, wow, this is kind of a only in Tears of the Kingdom

kind of moment. I don't know if, Justin, you have one in mind. I don't know. It's like so far, I really like the building mechanic. And yet, to me, the most gratifying thing I built has not been any complex object. It was just when I scavenged for like a bunch of different planks to string together into an impossibly long plank together. to get around one of those sort of Bacoblin fortifications

where they wanted to take this side winding path all the way up and have to fight through all the things. And it's like, I didn't come from above. I was just like, I'm going to make a plank that is half a mile long and I am going to climb over all of this and just go straight to the tower and unlock the tower. And I did it. And that is like, forget building a tank or a mech or a jet,

like just building a really long plank that just totally chased straight lines for me. Yeah, the TikToks are incredible already and they're just going to get better. Let's see someone just make a plank that covers the entire map.

I mean, how long will it take a to us see? Just for fun. Not to solve a puzzle or anything. Just for fun. I've had that same experience so many times and we'll talk about the new mechanics and the puzzles and everything. But there have been so many cases.

There was a shrine where they were throwing all of these, you know, zonai wheels at me. and I was just like, I'm not going to do that. I'm just going to smush all of these planks together, and I'm just going to cross without building whatever fancy machine you want me to build. And I'll get there one way or another. So that's, I think, one of the joys of this game.

Matt, is there any specific moment that stood out to you? Oh, yeah. I had a moment within the span of a minute. Just the highs and lows were just tremendous. I was up in the sky making a critical glide to another platform and did not quite hit the platform in a place where I could climb up it and instead just started plummeting and screaming expletives because I was very far from a travel point.

And then on the way down, I was like, oh, what is that? What is that right there? And I happened to find, I won't spoil anything, but the next hour of my life was just exploring this incredible thing that I never, I don't know how many hours later, I would have found this thing if I didn't miss it. that jump way up high and come all the way down. And now, like, I'll get back to what I was doing.

But huge detour, having a ton of fun, completely unexpected direction. And the game is constantly is like threatening you with alternate routes to take while you're trying to get something done. You know, Justin, you have that instinct to just build a giant straight line through things. And yet it keeps tempting you with other things to do on the side constantly. Yeah, my best laid plans are just always going awry, and yet I'm never upset about it. It's just like, all right, I guess I'll go over here for a while, and there will almost certainly be something that I want to do and something I want to see. I mean, that was kind of my example, too, is that I started out doing this little side quest like in lookout landing the central area in Hyrule. There's this sort of small little sidequist.

You crawl under a wall, basically, behind a wall. There's some whispering sound there, and you find a statue. that gives you the ability to reallocate your hearts and your stamina, which is incredibly clutch. I love that. That's an option. But beyond that, there's just a wall of stones that you can break. A lot of walls of stones.

So many walls. I'm still not done. I'm still not done sharing all of the stones. Oh, my God. Like, I wasn't even intending. Yeah, I wasn't intending to go that way. I was like, all right. I went down there just to figure out, okay, where am I going to go?

He talked to this guy with the map to figure out what the next step in my quest line is. And then I got sidetracked for at least an hour, if not more, just breaking down walls, basically mining and just kind of like grinding for stones and jewels. And then ended up getting some really cool stuff and there's this entire labyrinthine kind of mine network, cave network that I hadn't even intended to go in. But it was just like, well, I can break down this wall. And then there's another wall beyond that. I can break down. I guess I better see what's on the other side of that. And one thing led to another.

And time just passed so swiftly. And when I kind of came up for air, I was like, well, I did not do any of what I intended to do in this play session. But I had a great time anyway. So that's just kind of Tears of the Kingdom in a nutshell, much like Breath of the Wild. But I think there are even more possibilities this time around. So just the sky view tower level view here, Tears of the Kingdom. is a sequel to Breath of the Wild, which came out in 2017 and was hailed as maybe the most groundbreaking game in the series because it not only put Link in a fully open world,

but it also really revolutionized to put a fresh spin on the open world game just in general. And every Zelda game is a sequel in a sense because they're all part of the same lineage and they all basically boil down to sort of the same mute hero saving sort of the same princess from sort of the same big bad with sort of the same sword over and over and over again. It's just like Super Mario Brothers with tunics instead of overalls. But the incarnations of those characters are different, as are the times and the places and the graphical styles, whereas Tears of the Kingdom is a direct sequel, which means it's the same link and the same Zelda.

And most importantly, to a large extent, the same Hyrule. So it's not unprecedented for Nintendo to do a direct sequel to a Zelda game. Zelda 2, Majores mask, Phantom Hourglass, etc. But it is unusual. So, Matt, how has this game basically being Breath of the Wild 2, as it was referred to for years before the title was announced? How has that affected your expectations for it before it came out and your experience with it so far? Well, actually, I have a complicated relationship with Breath of the Wild. Let me just say that I absolutely love Breath of the Wild.

It's one of the best games ever. I love Zelda. but I think, you know, I mentioned a little bit in our Games of the Year discussion that I had like open world fatigue a little bit. And part of that was due to Breath of the Wild as well. And there are elements of Breath of the Wild that I didn't love. I'm a big hater on the weapon breakage. Yeah. The weapon durability, huge hater on that.

And the cooking I felt was a little tedious initially. Oh, I love the, you know, like the little music and the, I'm so with you on that, that, that, that, I didn't cook once in that entire game. Really? I just, I'm impatient, you know? Yeah, me too. I mean, I barely cook in real life.

So what I'm doing my virtual adventure and I have this whole huge, exciting world to explore, I don't want to stop at the cooking pot and toss some mushrooms and apples in there. So I have started cooking in Tears of the Kingdom and the nice little ditty is delightful. But yes, I got through that entire game without cooking. once. And there are sometimes when it's tough to do that because it's cold or it's hot and you have to like, I was, you know, down to my last heart and like flying all over the place and sprinting to a store to try to get the clothes instead of just buffing myself with with some nice meals.

My wife thought it was very silly of me, but it became like a stubborn sort of thing. And I guess it was also like an added challenge. Like, can I actually do this? Yeah. You live in the bachelor life. We're freezing to cook. We've all been there. Yeah. Yeah. So, I was a little bit apprehensive about Tears of the Kingdom because so many of the things that I had an issue with in Breath of the Wild were definitely returning. Yeah. So I think I've been pretty pleasantly surprised so far that although those elements are back, they're working in a slightly different way that makes them a lot easier for me to appreciate. And I'll start by talking about the weapon breaking, the weapon durability that I had such a big issue with in Breath of the Wild. So I don't really have an issue with it anymore because the way the weapon system works in Tears of the Kingdom is that all the weapons are bad.

But when you fuse them with different elements, they become good. And they become good in very specific ways. And that really kind of lets you tailor your weapons to the situation that you're presently in. Rather than holding on, like in Breath of the Wild, you'd hold on to some weapon in your inventory like, just in case I ever need this. and keep it in there forever until you maybe finally need it. And in Tears of the Kingdom, you really only need to be thinking about your present situation, what enemies am I about to encounter, what environmental effects might I need. And there's a lot of fun in getting new items to kind of pair with these weapons to find out what the effects are

and be like, oh, I can create this amazing new weapon that I didn't even think of before. Right. And so the durability really isn't bothering me this time because it's so overshadowed by the joy of discovery and customization to your present scenario. Yeah. The upside of the weapon breakage was that, hey, it makes you scavenge. It makes you explore because you have to because your weapons are constantly breaking. I also found it largely annoying. I think, as you're saying, whenever I would get a good, durable, relatively durable weapon, I'd be hesitant to use it because I'd be like, I got to say. save this for something, you know, and I end up just not using it ever because it's like, I got to save this for the big battle that's coming. It's like sneakerhead culture, right? You got those nice kids. You're never actually going to wear them.

Exactly. But you can walk around Hyrule like, oh, I just got this in the bag. It's not even used, you know? Yeah, right. So we'll talk about more of the mechanics. Was there anything else that you wanted to add just about the sequel nature of it? Sure. Well, the cooking doesn't really bother me anymore because you can select from specific recipes that

you've made and they let you skip the animation. Very impatient gamer and I want to skip all the animations and just keep, you know. Yeah, I never skip a cutscene, but I will skip an animation that I've seen a hundred times. Absolutely. But so aside from those things that I was sort of expecting having difficulty with, my big takeaway is just how much the multi-tiered levels vertically of the game, how much that adds to the traversal of the world and your experience, thinking on multiple levels versus just that sort of flat,

high rule map of Breath of the Wild, it's really just open up a whole other dimension and refreshed the open world exploration in a way that doesn't give me fatigue, in a way that actually excites me where I expected to maybe be fatigued. Yeah. And Justin, you had some reservations about some of the sameness, right? Well, I think in the sense, right, it's a real choice, right, to say, we're going to make this game. This game in a lot of ways is going to be more Breath of the Wild.

Not more as in just more, but more as in more, as in you thought you could do everything in Breath of the Wild. Well, here's a game where you can do more than everything you could do in Breath of the Wild. Right. And yet, you're sort of adding all of these new mechanics and all of this new context onto kind of. kind of a game that was designed for other abilities and other stuff like that. And even the verticality thing, right? I think going into it, yeah, I had this sense of, I'll tell you, sort of like my biggest pet peeve about Breath of the Wild was the camera.

As much as I love Breath of the Wild, I feel like that camera is like the Super Mario 64 camera. It just drives me nuts. It's like Link is wearing a neck brace. And so you take a game where you're like, well, the sequel is going to be a extremely vertical and it's like great. So now Lincoln's wearing a neck brace and constantly has to look up to its end. It's like, and I don't know. It's sort of, I think also that sense of when you go, I think that when you look at something

like the building mechanic, right, where you just sort of, the first time you're, you're sort of running around and you see those piles of materials and you see wheels and spokes and you're like, okay, okay. Let's see. Let's see we're going to do with this, right? but it's kind of like there's a lot being thrown at you, I think, at the beginning of the game that's new. And almost a little, I would say, overwhelming to me at first.

At first I was kind of frustrated by it, right? I was kind of like, look, I could already do everything in Breath of the Wild. And here I am in Tears of the Kingdom. And the game is sort of like, build a car, do this. And also, you don't have the paraglider for a bit in the beginning. And if you're still off of that like 200-hour, playtime muscle memory of Breath of the Wild. You were doing nuts.

Just wanted him to give you both the fast travel and the paraglider back and it takes a minute. Yeah. But I think that the more time you spend with it, it's kind of like video games always do, right? Where it's sort of you go into a video game, like a decently scaled video game, and you're just sort of, oh, systems everywhere. Every other minute is a tutorial and it feels like the most wonky, overwhelming thing. and then, you know, 10, 15 hours later, you know it like the back of your hand.

And it really isn't that complicated, right? That's the experience to me. Even more so than Breath of the Wild. Breath of the Wild, I feel like, Breath of the Wild, I felt like you could get maybe through the first of the four sections or whatever corner of the map you're in. And by that point, you kind of know what the game is

and you're just trying to build up your inventory, your stamina, your hearts and stuff like that. Whereas I think you can get half, way through that stuff, that sort of main storyline stuff in Tears of the Kingdom, and still be like, wait, I can build what? I can do what? What can I do? What can I do?

How does this work? Yeah. Yeah. There's definitely an initial learning curve, which is sort of exacerbated by looking at all the experts playing. And whether it's people who just started playing the leaked version or they're just incredibly good at games or whatever it is, like, I really enjoy seeing other people's creations, but that I look at my dinky little puny.

I'm like, look at my little plank car that I built. And this other person's got like a Star Destroyer. And it's like, what? But it's nice to know that that's possible at least. And I mean, on the sequel subject, I'd say it, there was strangely, I think, a lack of hype for this game until recently, until the trailer dropped. Because people were thinking it's a sequel. It has the same setting as Breath of the Wild. It's just Breath of the Wild.

called 2.0. Not that the 2.0 version of one of the most acclaimed beloved games of all time is such a bad thing, but okay, I get it, you want something new. And I'm all for judging each individual game on its merits. But of all the long-lived franchises in any entertainment medium, name one that's more dependably great than the Legend of Zelda. I mean, it's hard to beat the track record. The original Legend of Zelda came out the same year I did. It came out in Japan just before I was born and in North America, just after I was born. And like you met, I got the gold cartridge. I got an NES on my seventh birthday with Zelda, with Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles to the arcade game,

and the dual duck hunt Super Mario brothers. And honestly, seven-year-old me had no idea what he was doing in Zelda. But I loved wandering around, just as I do in Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom. And so this whole series has delighted me for decades. I mean, the worst mainline Zelda games are still good games, and the institutional knowledge and the creative continuity are incredible. The same people have been behind these games for decades. So if you tell me that Nintendo is taking six years to make a sequel, technically, I think if you count down to the month the longest gap between any mainline Zelda games, then until I see otherwise, I'm going to assume they're cooking up something special. And I think that is largely the case, even if it's not as much the setting.

as it is about the systems. And the other thing is that Breath of the Wild doesn't feel dated at all. So, yeah, it's based on the Breath of the Wild template. And we can and we'll talk about the graphics and the performance. But gameplay-wise, it's aged well. So like a lot of people, I think I went back to Breath of the Wild in the weeks leading up to Tears of the Kingdom, in part because I'd never actually beaten it. Just a lot of people seem to say that, actually, which I guess isn't so surprising.

You know, it feels like exploration and experimentation are the point of the game more so than beating Gannon. So it's sort of like when people play Grand Theft Auto and they never finish the story, they just drive around and do side jobs and make mayhem. And now that I've finished Breath of Wild, I'd say it's okay not to finish it because the ending is kind of anticlimactic. But the climbing mechanic and the go anywhere nature of the game, that still feels pretty special.

It's not like that's just table stakes now six years later. There are still so many big budget open world games that don't give you that level of freedom. And when you go from Breath of the Wilder, now Tears of the Kingdom to those games, it feels sort of restrictive. It's like, oh, we're going backward. We're not doing that still. And there's a familiarity to it all, which is sort of a double-edged master sword. I guess you have this re-skinned main map, but there's a ton of new territory, as you're saying, you lose a little something in feeling like you're covering some of the same ground, but you also gain something in that you can jump right in and as bewildering. and intimidating as the mechanics are.

At least you know where you are in the world. And you can catch up with characters and see how Hyrule has changed and reminisce about your previous adventures. Like, that's part of the pleasure of Zelda just in general, unless you're a link come lately like Charity here who hadn't played Zelda before Breath of the Wild. Like, you're playing a new game that feels fresh in so many respects. But the music and the enemies and the puzzles take you back to Zelda games from decades ago when they were 8-bit, so now you get innovation and nostalgia combined.

So I think for me, just the really only deflating thing is kind of what you were just saying about being busted down to your original rank, essentially, because when Charles and Steve and I talked about Jedi Survivor on Ring Reverse earlier this month, we praised it for not arbitrarily stripping away your powers from the first game. You build on them instead of starting over from scratch. Zelda never really works that way. So in the first scene of Tears of the Kingdom, you have all the hearts and all the stamina and a powered up master sword. And I was like, just enjoy this for the next few minutes.

Because it is not going to last. Well, slowly through that hallway. Yeah. And it does not last. So because it's the same link in the same setting, it's just especially striking that when I was playing Breath of the Wild last week, I could climb and fly forever. And now I get winded much faster. to your point, Ben, about both the hype cycle for the game and a sort of double-edged master sort of familiarity, right? It's sort of like, if I could introduce a point in comparison,

you know, part of how psychologically I justify dumping, I don't know, 300 hours into persona, right? Is that like, it's going to take Atlas 12 years to release another persona game. Yeah. Right. And also when they release it, it's going to be a new game. It's going to be new assets. It's just going to look different, have different music, everything else, right? And so that thing you're saying about Tears of the Kingdom and re-skinned and being a lot of the same assets, it's kind of real. I think that was another, to sort of in the spirit of what we were saying previously, that was another apprehension I had is that as much as I love playing Breath of the Wild and as embarrassing as my playtime in Breath of the Wild, I did have this fear that like, I'd boot up

Tears of the Kingdom, get a few hours into it, and be like, oh, but I've played this game. too much already in a different, in a slightly different form. And yet that kind of ran alongside my initial trepidation of like, oh, there's too much new stuff. This is too overwhelming. Give me the paraglider back. Where's the ballies gale? You know, all of that. And yet it takes a while to synthesize to those two sentiments, I think, and go, no, the assets

are obviously like very similar. Things look and feel and control very similarly. But that new stuff really does matter. and it almost does feel like it's this really masterful optical illusion that the game plays, where it's like you are playing in the same sandbox in a sense, but all of that new stuff really does amount to a totally different game that rewards totally different kinds of engagement. Yeah, absolutely.

And discovering the changes almost makes for a greater sense of discovery than when you're discovering everything new for the first time because you walk into a place expecting something and your expectations are constantly, you know, subverted. Right. New elements and gameplay mechanics. I just want to touch briefly on that moment we were talking about right at the beginning of the game

where you're strutting with your like billion hearts and your master sword. This is a minor, minor spoiler. This is literally the first five minutes of the game. But the first thing that happens in there, when you get your, when you get rocked, at the beginning there. And your master sword shatters.

And I thought that that was a real F you to me specifically as a weapon durability hater. That this entire thing wouldn't have even had a problem if we just had some weapons with durability. Right. Wait, can I also ask a question to you? Okay, I need the two of you as people who know a lot more about Zelda than me. I have to weigh in.

I thought it was cute, for lack of a better word, the beginning when Zelda's giving you all of the sort of introducing you to the, you know, the main race in this game and her little sort of freelance, freestyle archaeology lesson based on she's like reading these miracles and being like, this is certainly the history of like how much of that is sort of like how much of the history, I guess, in Tears of the Kingdom is stuff that's elaborating on stuff in older Zelda games. apart from you, that's allowed. I know a lot about Zelda in the sense that I've spent countless hours playing Zelda games

and almost every mainline Zelda game. I wouldn't say I'm an expert on Zelda lore. And I don't know that it matters. I mean, look, there are people who talk about the different heroes and the different timelines, and this link is in that game and that game, and this is set then, and this is set then, and they're reference books. Like, it's all out there. and I tried to read it to prep for this podcast.

And honestly, it's tough to retain. And I always just default back to its link. It's Zelda. It's Gannon. It doesn't. Like, you can make it all fit together. Right. Right.

This is, yeah. This is in the timeline. Right. And then there are games that are like at the very beginning of the timeline like Skyward Swords. But ultimately it kind of boils down to the same sort of game and the same essential plot. So sorry if I'm.

disrespecting the Zelda lore experts out there. But it's quite convoluted and yet also extremely simple. Yeah, I kind of have always viewed it as like a soft refresh at every generation, our new platform or new series of Zelda games. It's like, yeah. So you can tie them all together. They can argue that they're all existing on the same timeline and everything. But no, there's never been like a huge, tremendous focus on, you know,

keeping the story consistent through X number of days. decades of Zelda. Right. Yeah. And the games themselves are kind of skimpy on the details of plot points, you know, like Breath of the Wild, like, why has Zelda not aged in all this time? What's happening here? Now, maybe that's just because it was sort of setting the stage for Tears of the Kingdom

when we would find out more about all of that. But it ended without explaining a lot of that. It's kind of okay in my mind, at least. So let's talk a little bit about the changes and the differences. Maybe we can just address the quality of life improvements here, just the, basic sort of UI stuff that has been streamlined. And you mentioned the recipe cards, Matt, so you don't have to memorize or record how you cook various dishes, which was not an issue for me because I didn't cook any dishes. But if I had cooked some dishes, I would have wanted

to know how to continue to cook them. And now that's a lot easier. You also have the inventory, a lot less cumbersome than it used to be, right? Just like a lot less entering and exiting out of menus. If you're trying to pick up a weapon and all of your weapon slots are filled, you can drop one of your existing weapons without going back into the menu, reopening the chest, picking up that item again. So that's nice. That's just a small little simple thing that I deeply appreciate.

I guess also on the cooking front, you have portable cooking pots now, right? Yeah, those are. Yeah. You can. Yeah, just take a hot pot with you wherever you go. And there's also. Just like real life. Yeah.

I want to cook on the train. Is that how cooking works? I just don't do a lot of cooking. I don't know. But there's also, I think, improved fast travel, right? I don't know about you guys. I have not actually acquired the travel medallion yet, which is something you can get in the Breath of the Wild D.L.C.

And is also a part of Tears of the Kingdom so that you can travel a little more freely without just having to travel between shrines and towers. That hasn't happened yet. But I look forward to when that will happen for me. and make that easier. But again, I don't even mind that much because exploration and getting off the beaten path is half the fun here. So if I have to trek for a while, that's okay. There's probably something I want to see along the way.

Any of those things or anything else stand out to you just kind of on that basic mechanical level of, I appreciate that. This is a little bit better, a little bit different. I think you hit all the major points for me. Just those small quality of life things, the saving, like the. God forbid I have to hit the plus button and wait for an entire menu to come up on the screen. Yeah. It's just fatiguing, you know? So it really does feel nice to just be able to like flip up like a mini menu.

It's like, oh, who could be offended by such a tiny little mini menu popping up over what I'm already doing, you know? Right. And it sounds dumb. It really does. But like the amount of times you need to actually navigate a menu in this game is probably more. significantly than in the last game. So that quality of life improvement is actually essential. That matters so much.

Like in Ghost of Sushima, where you can just like pick up stuff off the ground without getting off your horse, right? Oh, yeah. And then like that was added to Horizon, right? Just like after the fact, it was like you didn't have to constantly press the thing to pick the thing up. Like it would just automatically pick up. You know you're doing a good gameplay dynamic when it ends up in the next horizon.

Right. Wow. Wow. Horizon catching some strays. Isn't it enough that every Horizon release gets overshadowed by a massive open world game? You need to take shots at Horizon in the middle of the Zellipod. I heard they got a paraglider. Good for them. Oh, man. We love Horizon here. At least Justin, I do. I do. I'm going to get to it. I'm going to get to it. So the new settings, right, I don't know how the total landmass of the sky islands and the depths compare to high. rule proper to ground surface level. But there's a lot of real estate there, right? I mean, the Hyrule itself is huge and massive. And I probably didn't see every square inch of it in Breath of the Wild. So a lot of it, it's either been a while since I was there or I never got there in the first place or it looks different in some significant way. But then there's also new stuff

and not just new areas, but new areas that play in a dramatically different way and look dramatically different, right? Just a different design, different technologies, different inhabitants, and different ways to go about playing. So it's sort of what you were saying, Matt, about all of it kind of working seamlessly being more than the sum of its parts. Yeah. And one of the things that, you know, it's pretty overwhelming, the amount of real estate there is in the game. So I think they've done a good job of like sprinkling little things in or they're like, okay, this map is pretty large and intimidating. Let me give you like, here's, here's, Here's a little treasure map after you beat this big bad guy.

And this will give you like a focus of where to go in this vast emptiness. You know, this will give you a good direction to start out in. So as soon as you're starting to feel overwhelmed, the game will give you little breadcrumbs of like, let me ease you into this very intimidatingly large space, you know? Right. Yeah, I find it less overwhelming in that way than some other massive open world games like Elder Scrolls or games like that where I just feel like,

I don't know where to go or what to do now. I sometimes hear people say that about Breath of the Wild, too. Like, there's nothing happening or they don't know what to do. I always feel like there's too much to do. There's like an endless amount to do, really. But I don't find it to be intimidating. It's more just like the sheer thrill of exploration and stumbling across stuff. And, you know, like, it will tell you more or less where to go.

If you want to just follow the main quest line, you'll get those glowing circles on your map, right? but there's just so much else along the way. So if you're someone who's coming into this with the mindset of, I only have so much time, I mean, we're all adults, you know, we have jobs and partners and maybe dependents and all sorts of things going on. So, yeah, it's a little harder to just throw away all of your other responsibilities and just sink into a game the way that it was when we were younger, perhaps. But whatever it is about this game, I just, I don't feel the fatigue. and the intimidation when someone says, you know, this new Assassin's Creed or whatever is just ginormous.

No. No. No. X percent bigger than the other one, which was X percent bigger than the previous one. It just makes me apprehensive. It makes me almost dreaded. It makes me less likely to play. Whereas here, I'm just like, yes, you know, just like shoot this into my veins.

Like, I'm not in any great rush, you know. And it's tough if you're trying to cram it to review the game or say, do a podcast about it. but I've kind of resolved not to rush it. You know, I want to play it like everyone is playing it. Again, man of the people over here. I just, I want to take my time, take a leisurely stroll through Hyroll and, you know, stop and smell the flowers, right? Because there are so many different kinds of flowers to collect and to put into your dishes for cooking,

which could also be overwhelming. But yeah, I find there's enough handholding, right? And the world, like, there's enough signposting. and I know I can just look around at all times and I can see something to do. You know, there's a tower shining in the distance. You can see the colors of a shrine somewhere. So at no point, really, am I ever at a loss for what to do or where to go. There's always something I can do.

And by the time I finish that immediate goal, then I'll be closer to the thing that I set out to do. I also think that there's that element of like, I don't know, it's an open world game, right? But you have games like, I mean, you brought up. Horizon, I'll also say something like Death Stranding, right, where these are big games, right? There's a lot of land mass, right? But also those, you know, Horizon, Death Stranding, like, those are the kinds of games that clearly are trying to walk you through a story. And they do, you can play around and explore, you know, maybe more in the post game, but

you're trying to get through a plot, right? Whereas I think the special thing with Breath of the Wild, with Tears of the Kingdom, and it was also the Eldon Ring thing is, you know, think of how many people you talk to, with Eldon Ring, who they're like, yeah, I've played the game for 30 hours. And they hadn't even gotten to market yet. They hadn't gotten to the first major boss of that game, right? You kind of have to, with a game like this, embrace that idea of like, yeah, if you don't know where to go, that's actually fine.

You can have the most fun you can have playing Tears of the Kingdom, playing it in a non sort of mainline goal-oriented way. Like, that's a perfectly good, chill way to engage with, tears of the kingdom. Right. And I think it's a testament to sort of the handcrafted, bespoke nature of this world, right? That there's always something to do. It's not just, like, procedurally generated territory. You know, like when I hear that Starfield is a thousand different planets or whatever, I mean, I'm excited.

Like, I'm hopeful, but I'm also like, oh, man, like that sounds like a lot of time. And also can you actually inject the level of personal attention to that terrain where it's going to feel like someone created this and it wasn't just auto generated? And that's not to say that like No Man Sky or any other game like that doesn't have a ton of virtues too. But something about Zelda where you can just tell like things are crafted. There are just all these little toys that are left there for us to find. There's an intentionality to everything. You know, you can just, you can sense like the master hand here behind all of it, just making sure that you're never going to be walking very far without coming across something.

Yeah, and to your point about like the way that you play this game and how chill it is, how you could really go into your own thing and, you know, not be driven towards the story. It's not like if you go online, you're worried about Tears of the Kingdom spoilers. Yeah, that's lovely. Right, right. Like 98% of everything on the internet about Tears of the Kingdom right now, at least, is just messing with the building and physics systems of the game. I'm guessing it's not going to end well for Gannon.

You know, like, I haven't read any spoilers, but just based on the track record. You got a bad track record. Yeah, Wink is going to end his whole career. Yeah, right, exactly. I mean, that's the big headline coming out of the game is the freedom of the crafting in this game. That seems to be what's resonating so much with everyone. So let's talk about that because that's the big difference other than the quality of life stuff and the settings, the new abilities, right? Ultrahand, fuse, recall, and ascend.

And you are introduced to all of these really early on in the Great Sky Island area. And I agree at first it felt overwhelming. It felt like I'm never going to get the hang of this. And Matt, as you said, on paper, this is my nightmare. You know, like I think I've mentioned here how I feel about crafting in general. For the most part, I don't like it and I don't do it if I have the option not to. I mentioned not cooking in Breath of the Wild. Here, you're crafting weapons, you're crafting vehicles, you're crafting solutions to puzzles,

you're crafting meals. It's nothing but crafting. It sounds like my nightmare. It sounds like I'm back in, in normal. man sky on a planet trying to build a door. Right. Like pre-reboot Norman sky. I'm in Sonnetica.

I'm underwater and I'm running out of air. Yeah. Yeah. But it's surprisingly I've taken to it because I guess it's in large part because this crafting isn't busy work and fetch quests like God of War or Horizon, if we're going to shout out Horizon again. I mean, yeah, it's not like, hey, every game has crafting now. let's insert some crafting to check that box.

Most crafting is done in games in a way where like, okay, you craft this and then you can craft that. And then once you have that, it's very much, this, and this, and that number of this so that you can build this. Right.

This crafting is entirely, is entirely like up to your own express impulses. I think it's expressive. It's incredibly expressive and it's, yeah. Yeah, it's the focus of the game.

It's more Fortnite than any of the other stuff. Yeah. Zelda meets Minecraft. I mean, it's just, it's not like grafted onto the game. I guess it is in the sense that you're taking, you know, the basic framework of Breath of the Wild and then you're adding all of this to it. But these abilities weren't present or weren't so extensive and empowering in Breath of the Wild.

So it's like this entire game is designed around these abilities. And as you said, it allows for so much creativity. So as we touched on earlier, like half the time, if not more, I'm not sure if I'm solving puzzles the way I'm quote unquote supposed to. You know, like anything goes. I mean, whatever works, just create some catamari Damasi monstrosity and just like lifting it. And then you get to the other side and you hear d-no-no-no-no-no-you.

Yeah, right. That was obviously what I was supposed to do. Yeah, it's just like, you know, you create this misshapen thing, this mass of planks and wheels and whatever the hell. And you just lift it like size matters not. And you get rewarded for that. Don't you think there's a humorous sarcasm to when you hear that sound after doing the most ridiculous thing you could imagine to get there? It's like a little sarcastic.

Sure, whatever. That's how we designed it. You've got there. Yeah, you cross the finish line, you know, like you may have just stumbled there. You may have crawled. You may have flown. Whatever, you got there. So I'd be really like, you know, I'm sure, of course, through their testing and everything, I'm sure they've experienced.

I'm sure they've experienced that there are a million ways to solve everything. But, you know, there's got to be some initial idea of like, here's how to solve this puzzle, right? Let's create this puzzle. And then this will be the optimal solution that we expect most people to follow. And I wonder just like what is, you know, the plurality or majority. Is there even a majority solution to some of these puzzles? Or is it just everyone has their own way, which is true of a lot of the puzzles. But as I know you've observed, Matt, not all of them.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And so when you end up having to solve a puzzle in this game that actually does have one solution in a temple or something like that, the contrast of having the freedom to solve most of these puzzles in a completely, like, creative way versus then being confronted with like, here's a puzzle. Find the one solution. You're just like kind of whiplashed by encountering a puzzle that has one solution in this game after you just Frankenstein your way to. solving the past like eight puzzles. So there's a little bit of whiplash there. But, you know, the freedom of those other puzzles, it's just so rewarding. And it's just such a fresh take. This must be the most like game tested game ever.

I know. Hundreds and thousands of hours of game testing to make sure that not only like, does this all work okay? And there's nothing game breaking. And it's, that must be why it took six years because they must have game-tested so much of this. And to run on that switch hardware and not crash

when you crush a coroc between two unstoppable forces. It's really just, and as someone who like in high school at one point got a C on an algebra test that I got everything right on because I just used my calculator. This kind of freedom to solve puzzles

is and coming off of Jedi Survivor where everything has one way to do everything. Yes, exactly, right, which can be great in its own way, but it's a different kind of greatness. And yeah, it is like a test where as long as you get the right answer, you get full credit, you don't necessarily need to show your work, you know, and you might have gotten there in sort of an unorthodox way. But the thing is that it's so much fun to show your work, right? Like, that's what makes this game so memeable, obviously. also so endlessly discussable.

That's why I was excited to talk to you guys about it. And as we progressed through the game to continue to discuss it, just to see how did you get past that part? Like, what did you do? Just because most games, I mean, you can talk about Jedi Survivor and this set piece and that set piece and that was a cool level and this was a fun fight and everything. And there's some creativity and how you approach a fight, right? And what powers you use.

But in this game, there are so many potential solutions that kind of comparing notes after fact. I mean, it's almost like in a pre-internet way before you could just watch someone else play. And it was just like, how did you get past that? Except that here, it's not linear at all. So there's just an infinite number of ways that you can potentially get past these things. I did want to talk about also the technical aspect of this, as you mentioned. I mean, let's talk about the graphics and the performance a little bit because that was another thing that people were very apprehensive about just how is the switch going to handle this, going on seven years after its launch.

And I've got to say, I've been playing it almost entirely in docked mode. So I imagine that the performance has been a bit better than it would be in handheld mode. But it's been fine from my perspective, you know? I mean, it's not locked just ironclad 30 frames per second. There are definitely some slowdowns. You know, when you activate certain powers, right, then it'll get pretty jittery. When you go into certain areas, there's definitely some. I'm moving like molasses, but for the most part, it doesn't interfere with my enjoyment of the game at all.

Would I like to play this game on new hardware in 4K, locked to 60 frames per second? Yeah, that'd be great. That'd be fun. But I think it is improved in certain ways, just having played Breath of the Wild recently, just subtle stuff. You know, lighting and shadows and cloud and mist and that sort of thing. Loading times, I'd say, are a bit better on the whole. I only get to see one or two tips on the loading screen before I'm right back in the world. So the fact that they added all of this, and it's partly a product of the fact that this is a switch exclusive, as opposed to Breath of the Wild, which was a cross-gen title that had to run on Wii U as well.

So some of the ideas that they couldn't get to work in Breath of the Wild or didn't have time or resources and horsepower for, like the Sky Islands, they just save that for this. and now they've had several years to figure out how to harness whatever power there is in the switch and also to optimize it for this system alone. And frankly, it's almost miraculous that it works as well as it does, I think, just performance-wise. And also just, gosh, talking about Jedi Survivor and how janky it is, which was another big talking point and bugs and patches every day. And it's not like terrible. It's not one of the more egregious examples. But my God, like this game runs so smoothly.

Despite the possibility space, I haven't encountered a single hitch, a single issue, a single case where I broke some sequence or I did something that I had to reset or load or anything like that. It's just like the Nintendo seal of quality, I guess. It's just like, you know it's going to work. You know, like there's some Nintendo published games that don't always work well, you know, looking at you Game Freak and various Pokemon games, right? But you do that. I'd do that. I'd do that. It's about to get spent. Yeah. Uh-huh. Yeah. But Nintendo developed games, like, you could count on a quality there. I mean, Nintendo as a company does a lot of things. Yeah. It does a lot of things that are not so likable and not so fan-friendly. But when it comes to the games just working, and especially a game like this, where there's so many ways it could go wrong and it could break. And it kind of like breaks in a good way. That's like, you know, part of the appeal almost. but it doesn't break in a way that like you're losing your progress or getting frustrated, right? And the whole thing's 16 gigabytes. Like how?

I mean, I know there's no like 4K textures and everything, but it's just amazing. I'm forgiving of jankiness and bugs and everything because it's a miracle that games get made at all, right? Like they're all wizardry and wondrous to me. But what a joy to know that this will be rock solid from day one. I mean, I never even spot a typo in this game. I'm an editor. I can't stop myself from spotting typos and pedantically pointing them out. And I haven't found one yet.

But you know that thing about the jankiness too is that to all, both of your points about sequence breaking, about the playtesting for this game and what that must have been like. I think the magic of both Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom, right, is that sense in which coming with coming up with like the dumbest solution to something, only makes you smarter, right? And it's like a game that just lets you feel smart for being really stupid. You know, like that's what I really...

That's the thing, all that jankiness. It's sort of the game finds ways to whatever jankiness there is about it is what's good about it actually. That's kind of the magic of this... Yeah. Yeah. And you know, Zelda as a franchise, and Nintendo as a whole, are so deeply rooted in nostalgia. And being that it's been so many years now,

since Breath of the Wild, hopping back into the Switch platform and the Breath of the Wild world, so to speak, like, it already feels nostalgic because it is so long ago. So I think it kind of rides a lot of its own nostalgia in presenting us with performance that is okay, but reliable. Right. And a lot of it's the art design, right? I mean, you can go back and play Wind Waker, you know, even if it's not Windwaker, HD, even if you can't get that on Switch,

just because of the cartoony, cell-shaded style, it holds up, right? And this game, too. I mean, it's not the highest resolution, but it looks good. And there are just so many moments where I want to stop and take a screenshot because there's a beautiful sky or a sunset or a sunrise or something, right? Rising over the hills and the mist and the rain.

And it just looks great, even if it can't compare kind of on a technical, you know, digital foundry breakdown video type level. But even Digital Foundry is pretty impressed with the way that they got this game made. And you're right. Like there's so much nostalgia. It's steeped in that, but it's never just that, you know? It's never just, hey, remember this song?

Remember this enemy? Yeah, it's that again, except it's 3D now. It's that, but it's also just the innovation along with the nostalgia. They're always doing something different. They're always adding some new mechanic. I mean, that hasn't always been the case in Zelda. You know, back before Breath of the Wild, it started to, to feel slightly stale and formulaic, right?

We're doing the same, you know, dungeons crawl and getting the same items in sort of the same order over and over again. And it's nice to return to that, but also you want to break the mold. And they're just kind of not content to just say, yeah, we're serving up the same dish that you've enjoyed. It still tastes good, but it's the same dish. Even though it's still the same nap, at least a large part of it, it's a different game. It's just a totally different game.

And I guess my only real complaint is that I still do. find it a bit finicky to control the ultra hand especially, you know, just like the rotating things. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that's, it's never, it's like, no, this way, that, no, that way. Like, I got to rotate it, you know, end over end, and then side to side to get it in the orientation that I want to get it in. So I still haven't quite gotten the hang of that. And maybe I will, or maybe it's just a limitation of how complicated that is and the limitations of a console controller. but the possibilities it opens up are so exciting that it's totally worth it, right? I think I'm getting better at it.

Yeah, I'm getting more of a feel for it, I guess. Yeah, I think so too. But it works better than I expected, just looking at videos, meaning like, oh, God, this looks like. Right. And it opens things up in the way that, you know, once you could climb anywhere in Breath of the Wild, if you can't climb in another open world game, it's like, I can see that and I can't go to it. now it's sort of similar and you know this isn't the only game that lets you manipulate the environment in this way maybe but to do it on this scale and with these possibilities and also the polish that you get from Nintendo that polish is is clearly their focuses on like stability right they don't want anything to break your experience right yeah like I keep trying to get this thing to divide by zero and it's just like yeah exactly so so we're You've got a lot of games for second, but I will divide by zero as much as you're not getting 31 frames, but we'll divide anything by zero.

This console generation has made me value frame rate more than I ever did. You know, I used to be like a graphics over frame rate guy. And now with the various modes that you get on PS5, especially, where you can go kind of like the performance or the quality mode or some games have a hybrid of the two. But always I go for performance because like when you have them side by side, it's just like you feel like you're underwater, you know, moving. from like 60 to 30. So that might be the case here too, but again, I'm not like comparing this to 60 FPS Zelda. That doesn't exist right in this form. So I'll take it.

I'll take the best version that we can have. And it's totally playable despite some of the concessions and sacrifices that you have to make because of the hardware. And obviously, you get the portability, which is a plus. So we're coming to the end of this episode. We still have a lot of game to go. And I guess I will leave you with that. what do you want from the rest of this game? Is there anything you haven't seen yet that you hope to see?

Anything that you want to get better at or that you want to be developed? How can Tears of the Kingdom satisfy you over the next however many hours you have left? I need to get back. I need to really engage with like building vehicles and sort of understanding how to tackle the terrain with them. You know what I mean? Because I keep kind of ducking the fade on that because I'm just, you know, I'm still stuck in that breath of the wild mode of, walking around is fun, running around is fun, climbing up things and just diving off of them is fun.

But I really got to, you know, stop building planks and start building tanks, you know. Right. Well, to that point, I think one thing that I'm looking for out of the rest of the game is I can see things reaching, you know, they're amping up in complexity as you go through the game. and I'm sort of hoping that sprinkled through out of the game, there will be moments where they're like going to teach me certain things where like, yeah, I might discover it on my own, but if I don't, eventually I'll stumble upon this thing that explains, oh, you can do this with this.

Because as it stands right now, I'm just getting more and more ingredients. Yeah. More and more sort of things to work with. The shrines start to get better about that as you go on, I feel like. The shrines kind of take that role in an interesting way. after a movie. So I'm just basically hoping that, you know, they will actually eventually teach me some of those

interactions because the deeper you get into the game, the more elements you have, the less likely you are to like combine two components in a certain way when your list of components just keeps growing and growing and growing. So I am hoping for a little bit of like showing and handholding as things get more complex so that it doesn't at some point feel overwhelming and I feel discouraged to experiment because of the vast number of possibilities I have. Yeah, that's the drawback about actually cooking now is that I'm hoarding ingredients in a way that I didn't in Breath of the Wild where it was like, let me sell this stuff or I got to get my, you know, quarter or half heart at a time, my uncooked mushrooms or

whatever. I'll just gobble this stuff up like candy. Whereas now it's just building and building. And it's like, oh, if I add this to an elixir or, you know, I add a monster part to this. So I could get some stealth or I could get some extra stamina or whatever it is. And I might never do those things. But I might. So I have to hold on to them. And now it's just unwieldy. It's like when I scroll through my inventory to find something or attach something to an arrow,

which is a cool thing that you can do now to enhance an arrow's ability. But it's hard to actually find the thing that I want to find now just because I'm carrying so much stuff with me at all times. But yeah, I mean, I feel like I've seen a little bit of everything the game has to offer. I think it might still surprise me. We have not, or at least I have not obtained the final ability, which is auto build, right? So auto build is basically just like, yeah, you can skip all that stuff. You know, like we will make you a, you know, paint by numbers, prefab, whatever you need for this situation. And you can just use some resources and, you know, service economy.

You can just pay someone to make this thing for you. And I don't know when I obtain that ability, when I will use it, or whether I will use it, or whether I'll feel guilty about using it. You know, I imagine I'll be tempted, right? But I also feel like, is that just defeating the purpose of playing this game if I just say, yeah, you do it? So I think I'm going to try to hold out as much as possible. Yeah, it reminds me a little bit of, I haven't gotten it yet. But it's like, you know, in Breath of the Wild, by the time you've done everything, you get the motorcycle. but that motorcycle then just trivializes

it's kind of like when you get an infinite rocket launcher once you've done all the hardboats in Resident Evil where it just trivializes things too much and the motorcycle you can clear the entire map in two minutes when you have the motorcycle it's kind of like I worry about it being like that but you know building is time consuming

so maybe it is rip the trade off right yeah and on a story level I mean again I don't really play Zelda games for the story but I would kind of like maybe a more satisfying ending narratively than Breath of the Wild gave me, which it felt like a little like an afterthought. You know, it's one of these games that, I mean, the final boss, at least I found was underwhelming.

You know, I was stocking up like, okay, I got to go get this and that and super weapons to fight cannon. And then I didn't find it to be even as challenging as some of the other bosses in the game. And then the story just sort of ended and it plops you back to your last save point instead of, you know, sticking you in a world where you have solved. the problem and you just get to keep exploring and everyone's happy. I was hoping for that infinite rocket launcher, but it just wasn't there. I mean, now it might be, maybe not infinite, but you can definitely make rocket watchers.

Oh, I have. Yeah, I haven't looked at any leaks or watched any playthrues or read any summary, so I don't know what happens here. But it's, it's been a while since I've even heard the dulcet tones of Princess Elve. I'm just like, Link, please come to my aid. I seem to have traveled back in time. and I'm stuck in Hyrule's history. And no, I'm still not a playable character.

But I would really like just a, I guess, a little more resolution, you know, especially because this is sort of the sequel to that game. And I hope that it will tie up some of the threads from that game. But I'm a happy customer thus far. And I assume that I will continue to be. And we will continue to report on our progress in future episodes of the Ring Reverse. So Justin and Matt, thank you for joining. me. I'm sorry for tearing you away from the game for the hour it took to record this.

I've been playing this entire time. Okay, good. With your toes, like a speed runner. Yeah. Under your desk. Thanks to Devin Ronaldo for producing and to Arjuna Ramqapal for scheduling some time for us to talk about great games. Keep chasing that high rule, that natural high rule. And we'll be back with more on May 31st. Feels like every product claims real protein these days. But real doesn't start on a label.

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