ひげ
it seems that the longer tears of the kingdom has been out, the less praise it has been getting. people are getting pretty critical of it now, myself included.
i can imagine that a year from now, it will be pretty low on most zelda fans' rankings. then, ten years from now, some 3 hour long video essay called "tears of the kingdom is a misunderstood masterpiece" will come out and change everyone's minds about the game except none of them will actually ever replay it and just think it was actually good.
that's the major test to determine whether a game was good or bad. if you can go back and play it ten years later and it's still just as good as everyone says it was, or you thought it was, if not better. games like ocarina of time, star fox 64, and mario 64 get better with age for me. games like silent hill that i never played until 15-20 years after their original release were just as good as people said they were. i can't imagine breath of the wild or tears of the kingdom falling into that same category, to be honest.
@pettanko hmmm, i'm not sure about twilight princess because i never liked that game to begin with. fuck playing as a wolf i wanna play as link.
i liked wind waker a lot when i was a kid and have gone back to play it a few times, the only thing that really drags it down is the damn triforce quest, which is so bad it had to be pared back in the remake. when the game first came out it got a lot of hate, but people seemed to come around later on while still being able to criticize those aspects that do weigh it down. wind waker has an immense amount of charm to it and i think that really helps hold it up.
skyward sword got a lot of hate when it first came out because of the motion controls. people talked about it being really inaccurate. the other point of contention was that you revisited areas a lot. i played the game in 2016 for the first time, so 6 years after its release, and i enjoyed it. the discourse around that one seems to have changed too. the motion controls actually worked really well imo, coming from someone who doesn't usually like them, and the revisited areas were still different dungeons even if they did carry the same motifs. the soundtrack is amazing, the story adds a lot of context, and the character interactions are all pretty good. pretty much the only really notably bad parts are how you have to fight the same boss (the imprisoned) several times and fi is annoying as fuck.
on the other hand, botw and totk were heavily applauded when they first released. botw still is to this day, i'd say even as totk is starting to lose favor. it wasn't anything like wind waker or skyward sword on launch. there are always people on both sides of the aisle of course, but it really seemed like people had it out for WW and SS for a while until other games came out.
ocarina of time had a period where people thought it was bad, myself included. but when i actually sat down and played it again i was pretty astonished at how the game made me feel to play. it's the same feeling i get when i replay wind waker, if not a little bit better. i haven't gone back to play skyward sword again, idk if i ever will honestly. i do know that every time i try to play twilight princess i am bored out of my mind and put the game down when i'm forced to play as a wolf lmao.
