beard ひげ @beardalaxy@gameliberty.club

@KiKi88 the gay shit continues

@Kerosene @rasterman they fucking love genghis khan too lol

@MiaElk @LittleTom there are some that are 100% definitely direct sequels. ocarina of time > wind waker > phantom hourglass > spirit tracks. all of them mention the previous games directly or have the same exact link. then you have ocarina of time > majora's mask > twilight princess which all either have the same link or directly reference each other too. those ones i know for certain, but i'm pretty sure zelda 2 takes place directly after zelda 1, and link to the past is directly followed up by link's awakening (which may also be the same link in the oracle games, can't remember).

breath of the wild was awesome imo, there is so much there to explore and the lore/theory crafting there was so immense. it felt a lot more open and less focused on the main story than totk was so there weren't really any weird or annoying plot issues. there's a certain beauty to the isolation sort of thing going on there. totk just doesn't really have that much of an identity beyond fusing shit together for the lulz. the best part about the game for me was going back through hyrule again and looking at all the new stuff they added, tbh. the depths were engrossing at first but then just slogged on and became way too lazy, the sky islands aren't unique enough for the most part to be particularly engaging, but hyrule itself got a good facelift that made me want to search through it again. especially with all the caves.

my only main criticism with botw is that there are no true dungeons and no dungeon items. most people have that criticism. with totk, it seems like they tried to incorporate dungeons but didn't really understand the task, so it is really only skin deep. the dungeons look cool and all have distinct themes, but that's about it. a lot of totk just seems like they wanted to address criticisms, but they really just didn't get why people were critical in the first place.

@deprecated_ii ratchet and clank rift apart c: actually a really good game! it's about 3 years old now. i've beaten it twice, second time around i made sure to 100% it too. i don't usually do that for video games so i'd really recommend it.

@icedquinn oh that's what you mean by channel lol

@deprecated_ii or at least not making the very specific places you can grab onto covered in yellow paint

just added the bonus for beating the game to god's disdain, and with that the game is now feature-full! only bug fixes and a little bit of artwork left to go.

the artist who did the rest of the stuff might not actually be able to get back to me in time, and i hate to do it but i might have to actually hire someone else to do their best to emulate his style for the last two face graphics i need.

it's partly my fault because i totally forgot those characters needed faces until relatively recently, when my artist had taken on many more commissions on top of a full time job. but it will really be a shame if he's not able to get to them within the next little bit here because on one hand i hate asking other artists to emulate someone else's style, and on the other hand i also hate to exclude him from work when he's done everything else in the game practically.

@icedquinn bidets sound nice, but I think I still prefer just using wipes. Using just paper on your ass is for peasants.

@j shout out to my science teacher in 8th grade, he was always really cool and even remembered I worked on video games a decade after I graduated. he kidnapped a girl 4 years ago.

@icedquinn the very idea of "political channels" is stupid af. Just makes people angry with each other. We don't need a political channel in the tetris speedrunning discord server (not actual just an example).

@LittleTom as far as story goes it might be one of the worst zelda games. Not just the basic story in a vacuum, which also kind of sucks, but its implications on the rest of the games' stories and the broader lore. It just makes things more confusing and answers nothing.

A lot of people have returned to the cope that zelda has never been about the lore and the developers don't think about it, but that's completely untrue. Zelda 2 was a direct sequel to the first game. Ocarina of Time was a direct prequel, technically, to A Link to the Past. Majora's Mask directly from OoT. Twilight Princess and Wind Waker were both devised as games that would take place on either side of the timeline split concurrently and at least Wind Waker was planned either during or shortly after OoT's development. Phantom Hourglass and Spirit Tracks are direct sequels to Wind Waker. Skyward Sword is obviously tied to everything and purposefully put before all the other games, and likewise Breath of the Wild takes place at the very end of its respective timeline. Very much so on purpose. Although some things change slightly (usually due to art style I'd say) and new things are introduced, they always fit very well with the rest of the lore and that's always been super interesting to me how it has developed over time.

With TotK though, for how much BotW connected back to the rest of the lore even in extremely subtle ways, there's just a whole lot of nothing. New things are introduced that are pretty much copies of old things but not old things so they don't make sense for the rest of the lore. It doesn't even connect back to BotW with anything other than some recurring characters and the Zonai. They went waaaaay too ham on the Zonai and made them way too important. But like, where did all of the Sheikah tech go? The director claims it just disappeared and nobody cared because weird things happen in Hyrule, but that's not even true because there is still a guardian husk on Robbie's workstation. It's all just cop out after cop out and the producer/director saying "ohhh I don't know, maybe this happened, maybe it didn't?!" because they don't actually know and they didn't care. Miyamoto would sometimes give cryptic answers and stuff but he always more or less knew what was going on, he just wanted fans to figure it out and gave their own interpretations because he was smart enough to know that it caused discourse and excitement. They tried to do the same thing with TotK but dropped the ball entirely because they LITERALLY don't know what the hell happened. They liken it to doing archeology, but don't realize that the PLAYERS are the ones meant to be doing that. The world should act like that. The WRITERS should know almost exactly what's going on otherwise it becomes incoherent and impossible to figure out.

TotK's story was so bad that all of the Zelda lore YouTubers didn't want to cover it. There were certain things here and there they discussed, but none of it is particularly interesting beyond just recapping the story. There were entire rant podcasts between a bunch of them where they complained about the inconsistencies and just the lack of anything interesting to talk about. The TRAILERS for the game gave way more intrigue to what could be happening than the actual game itself, and that's how you know they really messed up. Now they're all either completely moved on from Zelda or they're returning to business as usual, talking about other games in the franchise again. For the lore heads, TotK was a disaster.

Even the very concept of the Depths is just baffling. It's like they knew that players would not be totally satisfied about what was in the game since the world is mostly the same as the last one (which actually isn't true funny enough), so what do they decide to do? Just click the invert button on the topography for Hyrule and shove it under ground. You can't tell me NOBODY KNEW THIS WAS HERE! Zoras have lore going all the way back to OoT and nobody knows there is an entire underworld? FFS, there's a massive hole that the Yiga dude drops down in BotW that's implied to lead there. The sky islands I can understand, and they were actually already alluded to in BotW as being things only kids who were pure of heart could see from time to time. They were actually hidden by the Zonai on purpose. They really should have just made it underneath Hyrule Castle for the final dungeon leading to Ganondorf or something.

What a train wreck. I was really invested to begin with, playing the game, but the more I played the more I took issue with things and the more time passes without playing it the more I'm just like... This was stupid.

It's nice to have a more official timeline placement, being after either the adult or child timeline, at least. A lot of people thought it was in the alternate timeline but I'm glad they just keep mainline games out of it at this point since that timeline isn't technically "real." I was always someone who thought it took place in the child timeline. It makes the most sense, and even the trailers for TotK were really making people think that was the case, though turns out none of that stuff is actually connected at all. This new timeline seems relatively ambiguous on which split it is on specifically, so it could also be the unification theory where they both sort of meld together with enough time. Still not sure I'm 100% on board with that one, but I still think it's more likely than it taking place in the downfall timeline.

It is unfortunate that there's no mention of the new Zelda game coming out, echoes of wisdom or whatever. It probably goes up top though, since that's where all the games that use that Hyrule go. It would just be nice to know WHERE.