Animation Lead on Wanderstop! She/Her & Transgenderrific! Past: Radial Games, Gaslamp Games



  • The building gameplay and its execution is maybe one of the most impressive feats of game development I've ever seen and I'll be actively mad if they throw it away with the next game. I'll be interested to see if anyone even TRIES mimicking this the way everyone did with BOTW's climbing, because the QA load alone is terrifying.
  • A larger and more ambitious game than botw in every way, which is shocking, and even more shocking is that it almost entirely works out
  • ...Except in the case of the story, which conclusively proves BOTW's minimalism was the right idea; they're not capable of fleshing out a story in an interesting way, even when they've got all the ingredients right there and a fun cast of characters to boot

They've already said they consider this type of game the future of the zelda series and I exit TOTK pretty sold that they can continue to come up with new and interesting ways to work with that, at least in the medium term; I came into this seriously worried I wouldn't be interested in More of BOTW and was proven so conclusively wrong so fast that it's hard not to be impressed, especially coming from a series previously known for its long, slow stagnation.

So yeah. Good game. I'm still, because I am a baby, over here pining for more stuff like Link Between Worlds and Link's Awakening's remake because I feel like I've been consistently let down by many indie attempts at aping the series' 2d entries (and the best ones tend to be the ones that depart from it the most aggressively) but i'm probably just going to have to whine forever because small handhelds no longer exist so no way are those happening anymore


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in reply to @MOOMANiBE's post:

i haven't played a lot of indie zeldalikes, but i think the whole reason the game boy entries worked is that they had a lot of stuff in them actually, and i would guess it's easy to remember them as "oh little game boy games" and dramatically underestimate how many instances of Stuff you need to replicate the experience and not have it feel incredibly barren

the key thing for me is always that the level design of 2d zeldas is typically hideously tight on a level that is difficult to replicate without colossal amounts of design experience. Like metroidvanias, it's the kind of thing that you think "sure that's how the genre is" until you experience someone getting it wrong and realize how big the gulf is

i think that might be the other side of the same coin, even — it's tight because they come up with an interesting thing to put in every room, which does require having a sufficient number of interesting things

Lately almost everybody I ask "which is your favorite Zelda before BotW" answers with Minish Cap VERY surprisingly, so I hope the demand for a 2D Zelda will build up and give us something new one day. Maybe in 10 years lol