I’m not terribly sad right now but am extremely tired. I managed to get a temporary fix to my bad mattress/back issues that has at least worked for one night but has left me feeling the cumulative weight of not sleeping well for about three weeks in a row. We’ll see if it lasts and doesn’t introduce its own issues [it hasn’t so far, as of the day before this goes up, even if it is clearly not an ideal solution], but right now I’ve spend all my spoons on work stuff (to the degree that I bought takeout rather than spend any time or effort on preparing food for myself) and I don’t have it in me to come up with anything thoughtful or reflective of this moment in my life, so I though I’d formally write down why I liked The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild so much and feel so neutrally about its sequel, Tears of the Kingdom. I can boil it down pretty succinctly, which is why this will be a relatively normal-length blog post, but I want you to know, reader, that there’s another version of this that takes up a week’s worth of posts because I’ve been thinking about this for over a year now and this sort of critical analysis via comparison and contrasting is the core skill forming the ground on which all my media analysis skills have grown. Which is to say that the reason I like BotW more than TotK is because the first one holds your hand long enough to get you up and walking while the second one holds onto your hand throughout the entire run of the game, which often means you have to drag it behind you as you try to experience the game.
Continue readingTotK
I’m Tired and Sad, So Let’s Talk About The Legend of Zelda: Episode 24
When I started this series as an alternative to writing about how I felt and putting myself in a situation where I was just venting all over my blog in a way that wasn’t particularly constructive, I picked this title because I was frequently tired and sad. Most of the time, I was sad because I was tired and not getting enough rest was (and probably still is) the leading cause of periodic depression in my life. I was only occasionally tired because I was sad, though I sometimes descirbed other emotions that were exhausting me as being sad so I could write one of these blog posts to help me get over them, but the two things were always related. I was tired and sad as a result of something specific causing one or the other (or both) and then the missing one would follow immediately behind. These days, though, as I find myself writing these more frequently again for the first time in quite a while (perhaps, as I’ve begun to suspect, that I was too tired and burned out to be anything but physically, mentally, and emotionally exhausted), my tiredness and sadness are entirely disconnected and will not be solved by writing about something I enjoy immensely. Which is unfortunate, because there’s a pretty apt metaphor here, somewhere, and I’m way too tired to see it from where I am right now [editing this, I can see it, but I’m going to let you find it yourself rather than call it out]. Instead of continuing to dig for whatever that is, I’m going to write about building weird contraptions in The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, and the three economies involved in that process. While I’m tempted to make the argument that there are two processes, since things work a bit differently if you’re building something you’ve already made in the past than if you’re putting something together for the first time, it doesn’t really make sense to deal with them separately because you can’t rebuild something if you don’t build it first.
Continue readingI’m Tired and Sad, So Let’s Talk About The Legend of Zelda: Episode 23
I’ve been replaying The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom in my evening game time for the last month or two. I’m trying to re-experience the game without all the urgency I felt last summer and to take the time I feel I need to explore and enjoy it more fully. So far, it has been a better experience. I’m frequently lost and unsure of what I’ve been doing or have already done, but having the Hero’s Path means I can at least check where I’ve physically been. That, plus getting the Korok Mask and Sensor upgrade much, MUCH earlier this time around means that I’m reasonably confident that, for everything but my first twenty-to-forty hours of this file, I found all the Korok seeds and Shrines in those areas. Being on my second pass of the game means I’ve been able to more specifically target my efforts. I can easily prioritize the stuff I encounter because I already know how most it will turn out and I can more directly tailor my nightly gaming experience to what I want. Some nights I focus on shrines and filling up my map of the Depths with marks for lightroots. Some nights I spend trying to explore the depths in a fun but still efficient manner (so it stays fun to explore them rather than getting tedious like it did in my first playthrough). Some nights I focus on running quests, filling out my map, or just exploring interesting looking ruins. It’s a lot more fun this time around, even if I’m not as excited about it as I was the first time around.
Continue readingPicking Through Hyrule In Tears Of The Kingdom
While watching Dimension20, I’ve been playing through The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom again. I’ve given up on any hope I had for a Master Mode and done my best to accept the game that was sold to us. It feels unfair to say this, but it feels so much less than I hoped it would be. I understand that my expectations were set sky-high by Breath of the Wild, but I feel like so much went into turning that game into An Experience that just wasn’t kept around for the sequel. The sense of wonder and grandeur that Breath of the Wild builds is spent trying to create a sense of horror around The Gloom and Ganondorf’s return instead. All of the early building in the introductory sequence falls flat because all that accomplishes is setting us at what is the common starting-point for almost all Legend of Zelda games and then none of the freaky gloom, horrific music, or creepy visuals come up again as something to be dealt with or feared for multiple hours. Then, when it finally comes up again, it is a minor environmental hazard tied to The Depths, which is unfortunately the section of the game with the greatest squandered potential of all, or a strange and potentially terrifying encounter that is incredibly easy to flee from. It becomes a minor concern only during the final boss fight and, even then, if you’re set up with halfway decent armor, good food buffs, and tons of hearts, it’s trivial. With none of that to rely on to create a coherent throughline for the game (like the mixed wonder of exploration, grief at finding a decayed world you can’t remember but know you failed to protect, and hope for the future that thread their way through all of Breath of the Wild), all you’ve got is an admittedly fun game to play with an interesting world to explore while building all kinds of weird machines.
Continue readingI’m Tired and Sad, So Let’s Talk About The Legend of Zelda: Episode 22
It has been almost three months since I wrote the last entry in this series. I thought I’d probably hold off on more entries in this series until I’d spent more time in Tears of the Kingdom, but I’ve yet to have a reason to return to that entry in the franchise. All of my video game time has been spent on new games (or at least new to me, since Ni No Kuni is absolutely NOT a new game), so I haven’t felt much call to return to any old games, other than the sort of on-going repitition of playing Baldur’s Gate 3 (though I’d argue that doing alternate storylines isn’t exactly the same thing) and a desire to do a New Game + of Chained Echoes because I still don’t have anyone to talk to about that game. There isn’t as much beckoning replayability in Tears of the Kingdom as there was in Breath of the Wild. BotW had DLC already planned for it, that you could pre-purchase the day the game came out, after all. It has now been four months since TotK came out and there’s no word on DLC other than Nintendo’s usual “we have no plans at this time” statement. Which, you know, feels like it is misleading a lot of the time, but I’ll admit that this feeling might be a bit misdirected because Nintendo probably doesn’t get asked about unannounced DLC for small games that are unlikely to have it. They probably only get questioned on big games that don’t have DLC already announced, which feels like an incredibly skewed data pool to be used as the basis for drawing any kind of conclusions. So who knows what there will be, if anything, for TotK in the future, but I’m not going to hold my breath.
Continue readingWrapping Up The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom
I finally beat The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom over the weekend. Took more than one hundred fifty hours of gameplay over the course of two months (with, you know, a three and a half week gap of not playing at all), and I still have tons of quests, Korok seeds, and unexplored areas if I ever want to spend more time in the world before whatever DLC there will be comes out. It feels a little unreal, if I’m being honest, since I wound up doing the last few major portions of the game in a relatively short time. Mostly because I’d accidentally done huge sections of them while wandering around the world in search of shrines or just exploring something that look cool before I got to the part of the game that prompted them. I’ll admit I really struggled to do some of those things when I stumbled across them because it was clear that I wasn’t supposed to be doing them yet (I got the Sage of Spirit as my second sage, because I wanted to see what was inside the permanent thunderstorm and literally just got lucky since my interrupted flight toward said clouds landed me right next to the final shrine of those sky islands), but at least it let me do them when I got there. It was a pretty fun game and I definitely enjoyed it overall, but there was a lot of stuff that just doesn’t really feel like it landed (pun absolutely intended) well.
Continue readingThe Legend of Zelda: Barriers to Play Is The Worst Sequel Ever
I haven’t played The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom in three weeks. Three of the five weeks (as of writing this, anyway) the game has been out. Sure, I got maybe one hundred hours in during those two weeks (though I actually played eighty to nintey of those and the balance is me just leaving my Switch on while doing other stuff), but I’m maybe fifty percent of the way through the game if I’m guessing its depth correctly. My sporadic ability to play the game made it difficult to focus on getting anything specific done (not to mention the executive dysfunction I’ve been struggling with over the last two months), so I wasn’t even playing through things efficiently. I don’t mind a lack of efficiency so much, since I was definitely having a lot of fun building things and driving weird contraptions around, but it does mean that I feel like there’s still so much game to play and that it’ll take another one hundred hours to complete it.
In actuality, I bet I could finish it in fifty if I stopped messing around and focused, but that feels a little beside the point of playing a video game I enjoy as much as every entry in the Legend of Zelda franchise. Regardless, I’m now four days into being done with unpacking and I haven’t touched it yet, despite having the time to play some games. I can definitely chalk some of it up to the newness (to me) factor of Diablo IV and Star Wars Jedi: Survivor, both of which feel more compelling and urgent than Tears of the Kingdom does, but that’s really just a drop in the bucket. Most of the bucket is full of a terrible mixture of executive dysfunction and emotional exhaustion. Which is also why Star Wars Jedi: Survivor is the easier game of the lot to play right now and why all my thoughts of playing different games involve things that aren’t Tears of the Kingdom or Diablo IV.
The explanation for why it’s difficult to get myself to play Diablo IV is easy. It is a very noisy game. There’s a lot going on. When I’m stressed out or tired (or both), it can be incredibly overwhelming, especially when my old PC audio system had to get thrown out after I started packing it up and discovered some of the cables were a little melted. Listening to something on headphones makes it feel much more immediate and present than listening to it in the environment around me, so I tend to avoid headphones when I’m stressed out and tired, and that’s just with normal music or podcasts, all of which has a lot less sensory input than a game like Diablo IV does. Once I feel less drained and emptied out by life, it will be a lot easier to play Diablo IV and I’ll be able to do it for longer than a few chunks of an hour at a time.
Tears of the Kingdom is a much more complex situation. Part of it is sheer distance in time now, since not only has it been three weeks, but it was an entire apartment ago. Packing, moving, and unpacking separate me from my last experience with the game and the stress of all that colors my perceptions of it. Not to mention that I was gearing up for the game’s release when my friend finally explained why she was ignoring me, or that most of my gameplay happened around an incredibly fun but also incredibly stressful trip to the East Coast to be in my friends’ wedding. There’s a lot of emotional baggage, good and bad and just overwhelming in general, attached to the game in my mind. None of which is the game’s fault, but sense memories and emotional associations are difficult to unravel and counteract. I mean, it’s been more than half my lifetime since I first played Luminous Arc while listening to the first official soundtrack from Scrubs but I still can’t hear most of those songs without remembering myself sitting in my armchair in my bedroom, playing on my DS as I battled through the early levels of the game. I mean, most of them even conjure up images from the game when I just think about the songs, let alone when I am actively listening to them.
The stresses of this year have continued to build upon each other without me ever getting a chance to release the pressure or address any of the issues that either resulted from the stress or that caused the stress in the first place. Right now, as I’m writing this in the middle of June, I’m finally facing a mostly-empty social calendar so I can finally catch my breath and still I can’t seem to escape petty drama, hefty emotional issues, and the growing anxiety around people not responding to my messages when I try to reach out to them (the thing with my friend took one of my oldest anxieties and fed it until it has become difficult to ignore, deny, or cope with right now). I mean, I was invited on a trip in September that I know I shouldn’t go on, but I’m putting off telling the group because that will require emotional energy I don’t have. I know the answer. I know I could techincally afford it but really shouldn’t spend the money. I just don’t want to have to cope with the feeling that I might be letting people down or missing out on another chance to connect with these people.
These are all hurdles I will overcome eventually. There’s just a lot of them right now and I’m so tired I can barely stand, let along start trying to jump or dismantle them. Eventually, I’m sure, I’ll start playing Tears of the Kingdom again and driving around in a weird car will be a ton of fun that doesn’t involve any of the weird emotional associations I’ve made. I’ll slowly break through them all and be able to just enjoy myself without needing to tackle any of the emotions or issues my mind and heart have associated with the game. For now, though, I’ll probably be sticking with something a little less emotionally complex.
Tears of the Kingdom Is A Very Long Game And I’m Having A Great Time
I have now spent every moment I could spare playing The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom since it came out almost two weeks ago. I’ve got some eighty-ish hours in the game, though between five and ten percent of that is my Switch idling as I dealt with other stuff (such as leaving the game running while folding laundry, packing, or cleaning my kitchen). Still, that’s a pretty significant amount of time over a two week period and I feel like I’m maybe halfway through the game, as far as what I’d consider a “complete” run goes. Which might be inaccurate, since I have no idea how much of the game exists beyond what I’ve already played and can see coming my way through the broad strokes of my current quests. I imagine there are a bunch of things that aren’t quite visible yet, given the changing nature of the world as you work through main quests, but I accounted for that in my estimations.
Continue readingMy Initial Thoughts on Tears of the Kingdom
This is a reactive piece with as few spoilers for The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom as I can manage. There are probably still some small ones scatted throughout this post, but there aren’t any major ones. There are some non-specific references to some unlocked things, which could count as a spoiler depending on how you define them, but I don’t mention any abilities by name or what main quests give you what. I don’t even mention half the stuff you can get up to, that caught me by surprise when I started the game. Honestly, if you’ve watched all the trailers, then none of this should be a surprise to you and I think I did a good job of riding the line between obscure references that people who have played the game will get and things that are vague enough not to spoil any details for someone who hasn’t played the game. But that’s just my opinion, so maybe bail out now if you want to avoid any influence or references to the game (which feels weird to say since this isn’t going up until a week and a half after the game came out, despite the fact that I’m writing this the Monday after it came out).
Continue readingAll Aboard the Hype Train for The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom
Once again, I an interrupting my planned schedule so that I can write about The Legend of Zelda. This time, though, instead of writing about streaming Breath of the Wild on Twitch in the month remaining before Tears of the Kingdom comes out, I’m writing about Tears of the Kingdom itself. After all, a new trailer just dropped. Speaking of which, if you’re planning to avoid spoilers or any information at all about Tears of the Kingdom before it is in your hands, you should absolutely leave now because this whole post is just going to be one long, enthusiastic gush about the trailer and everything I know about the game (which isn’t much, sure, but I’ve picked up a lot of stuff from the existing trailers and I’ve got literally no other outlet for this enthusiasm these days). You have been warned.
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