 |
| Look I know this is wrong but Zelda is a hot booty queen now, right? |
Late to the party, playing the games in the "wrong" order, yeah story of my life but when I first bought a Switch to help cheer my daughter up during lockdown, Zelda BOTW was one of the first games I picked up for it.
I remember firing it up, getting royally stuck on the first Plateau area and...shamefully shelving it for 3 long years.
But after playing (and yay, finally completing) my first ever Zelda game - Tears of the Kingdom - I thought "What the hey, let's go back and finish its predecessor".
Immediately I realised that the whole 'escaping the plateau' area was akin to escaping the first sky island in TOTK so I gritted my teeth and got on with the job at hand. Armed with new knowledge of how to heat / and cold-proof myself to access some of the areas I hadn't seen before and some of the shrines you need to complete in order to get the all important hang glider, it was game on.
The more I played, the more I realised that - actually - playing things in the wrong order wasn't such a bad idea after all. While playing TOTK, everything felt fresh and new purely because I hadn't played and completed Breath of the Wild, but Nintendo have been very sneaky here - and a lot of the assets, character models, map areas and even some of the game mechanics have been lifted and shifted from this game into the next. So going back to the original felt like playing an expanded bit of DLC in reverse. Bear with me, I get coherent after a few paragraphs!
One thing that frustrated me at first was the difference in the UIs. The controls to navigate menus in BOTW feel decidedly clunky after playing TOTK for so long. I also really missed stuff like the fuse powers and ascend powers, realising just how utterly useless chu chu jelly is in BOTW compared to how useful it can be when glued to an arrow in TOTK (that and how utterly useless most of the weapons feel in BOTW when you can't fuse a handy dead creature body part to them to up their stats).
 |
| Tiptoe through the mushrooms, throwin' bombs |
That said, I got on with the main quests, marvelling at how Nintendo took all the good stuff from games like the Soulsborne sagas, and even Shadow of the Colossus to build out those gigantic guardians and turn them into mobile dungeon quests in their own right. Some pretty genius game mechanics abound in those levels, but quite frankly fuck those boss critters - one had me stumped for ages before I realised that this game wants you to see everything, and experience everything - and sometimes you need to do a hell of a lot of side quests to tool up to get the right armour or weapons to confront a big bad (Rubber armour, who knew it could turn an unpassable boss into a complete pussy).
At time of writing I'm one big divine beast quest away from throwing down with Ganon (who I'm really looking forward to dessicating - yeah one thing about playing the games in the wrong order is you now know that you're going to win even if - in the real world - you might not be patient enough to polish off that last boss fight) but again I've enjoyed every minute of playing this and actually PROPERLY playing it this time rather than bouncing off it. It's going to leave a massive gap in my life once I've done with it but I'm sorely tempted to just fire up TOTK again and play through right from the start all over again, armed with a bit more foreknowledge of what works and what doesn't, and just taking my time roaming the vastness of Hyrule.
Nintendo, you have surprised me this year. You've made me love games again far more than your competitors, who have become so bogged down in micro-transactioning all their most powerful IPs that they've totally forgotten what makes a good game.
Comments
Post a Comment