Legend of Zelda - General series chat

OrangeRKN wrote:Everyone who dislikes Demise (3 fights that all have unique variations including the fantastic groosenator) should play Hyrule Warriors so they can learn to really dislike him

Honestly I kind of like the last imprisoned fight; it does cool gooseberry fool, but the first fight already makes you run up that strawberry floating cliff and having to constantly do that every time you fight him is incredibly tiring. Like my issue with these fights is at least for two thirds of each of them they dont do enough to change up the flow and pacing of, the pacing in first fight already being flawed imo. It does capture the feeling of fighting something that size, but having to constantly run up to cut off its gross ass toes is snore inducing.

OrangeRKN wrote:It's just a different kind of game. BOTW goes in the opposite direction and also does so very well. SS is a linear action adventure game, it's like criticising Uncharted for not being open world. It's fair to not like that so much from personal taste, but it's not a fair complaint against the game's quality. It always comes across like people have a set expectation of what a Zelda game should be and then complain because they've done something different - but do the opposite and you end up with something actually really difficult to replay like Twilight Princess because it just retreads known ground.

Yeah funny you mention that actually; I'd go so far as to say BOTW has the reverse problem. The constant open world exploration can very easily get boring in that game past the like 50 hour point because that game also in a lot of places doesn't do enough to change up its pace, though because it's mechanically stronger and better designed than Skyward Sword and as such its core gameplay works better it remains engaging for longer.

To elaborate on the design point; the thing that very much frustrates me about Skyward Sword is how railroaded it actually feels and how that grinds against your expectations when you start the game, that being early on you're offered to explore this mysterious and unknowable world below, but it instead ends up being a series of corridors whose design feels practically unorganic. This really ends up breaking immersion as you're quite clearly in some dumbass video game world filled with slow and uninteresting motion control puzzles.

You can argue its taste; but tbh I dislike open world games normally and have more fun with carefully designed linear action games. The key difference with those is that they tend to have much more interesting/developed systems to play with. So like, Skyward Sword is an action game right? Its focus is on its sword play and by extension enemy design; this would be fine, but enemy behaviours aren't particularly varied, and their AI is outright stupid (I would just snipe moblins from a short distance and they wouldnt notice gooseberry fool; it wasnt fun but it was more interesting than flailing my arm after running over its shield for the millionth time). Strategy against most of the enemies amounts to waiting for them to move their arms and then swinging the Wii remote in the corresponding direction. This makes most fights a waiting game, which is exactly the problem Ocarina and many other 3D Zeldas have, but this is mitigated somewhat by combat being less of a focus in those games (WW and TP also introduce mechanics to make fighting more interesting, and they go a long way towards making Zelda combat more tolerable). It's almost like a modern FPS campaign right? Those boil down to waiting behind cover and then shooting the coloured dude that's shooting at you, which I think is quite close to what SS' combat focused parts are (maybe not quite fair; SS does have a fair amount of decent level design at least, but that doesn't invalidate my issues with the gameplay loop of its most essential mechanic).

tl;dr SS' combat feels underdeveloped for its significance and as such allows little depth of strategy and self expression

Also I think Twilight Princess is actually easier to go back than Skyward Sword on account of what the games each set out to do; while SS strives to innovate and sort of achieves that, TP takes what was established in previous Zelda games and then refines it, thus it feels like the most complete and well realised traditional 3D Zelda. SS is full of new ideas but as enumerated above a lot of them are underdeveloped by comparison.

The Watching Artist wrote:

VlaSoul wrote:-three demise fights that could have been one or like two
-the time when the forest floods and you're made to collect strawberry floating tadpoles
-all the ridiculous dowsing the game makes you do (find these tree people oh strawberry floating boy)
-fetch water for the dragon from a somewhat re contextualised area
-the fact that every strawberry floating area has a silent realm; I like the idea of them but much like Twilight Princess' Twilight realm it overstays its welcome

Its funny what people consider filler because to me that just reads mostly like a list of different and interesting things to do in the game. The dowsing is a good example because its not really about what you are asked to do but what you have to do along the way. Unpicking the areas in order to locate the cute tree people. Stuff like tightrope walking, learning to use old items but in a new way, time shift stones are really what you are doing. Also SS Silent Realm > TP Silent Realm. I like the TP ones as being Wolf Link means you get a slightly different skill set but the SS ones ask you to have a very different hat on to pass the stealth tests sheer terror of being spotted

I enjoy the changes of pace that the stealth sections of each game provide, but I think they reoccur too much and each one isnt hugely interesting so at least personally I just ended up dreading having to do them by the last two. This is one area where I think my opinion might change if and when I replay SS tho

Dowsing wouldn't be as bad if the levels weren't so linear; as a consequence of the very constrained level design it feels entirely pointless most of the time as you could really just follow the prescribed path and look around a bit. If the game was more open world it would work better, and in fact I'd say it does indeed work in the far more open Lanaryu sea bit, as that's like the only point in the game you're given such a massive area to explore. Shame the rest of the overworld wasn't like that.

The Watching Artist wrote:Oh and I'll defend the tadpole bit with my life. SS had the greatest swimming controls in any 3rd person game and to not have another section dedicated to it would have been a crime. They should have done something like that with the skydiving though. Oh and its miles better then the bit in MM when you have to do Gerudo Fortress/Valley mark 2.

Maybe this is personal but I remember the swimming controls doing a number on my wrist at the time, though I'll concede it was a good idea at least
chasing around tadpoles feels strawberry floating ridiculous and stupid when you're trying to save zelda and kill demise or whatever the strawberry float you're supposed to be doing at that point in the game; I recall just a total narrative dissonance when that bit happened