ToTK and how it contradicts the lore of the series along with thinking about how complicated the lore the series already was post WW had me thinking:
Zelda really had some charm that was lost in Ocarina of Time and even more by the time of The Wind Waker. The first four games prioritized gameplay over story, and the story that was there wasn't some over convoluted mess of a lore like it is now. And while there were technically multiple Links in those games, it wasn't apparent at the time. For all we knew, the series was about a single hero and his multiple adventures in Hyrule and surrounding regions.
Part of me wishes that the series stayed simple. None of this convoluted lore, half-baked story over gameplay, ship-bait female characters, etc. Just fun, top-down, action-adventures with RPG and Metroidvania elements, and just have it be about a single hero and his many adventures.
Seriously, just looking at modern Zelda and it's fanbase, it's mostly just shipping and debating about the lore of the series. The latter isn't bad by any means. The former is, however, and even then, it feels like most people don't even care about the gameplay. Like all the praise that OOT gets is just how "emotionally impactful" the story is when it is really just the same "coming of age" story where a character realizes that they are not who they thought they were, and the gameplay is just ALTTP in 3D.
@xianc78 dude I hated Zelda games around Skyward Sword when they 1) made a “””real””” timeline where some games only “”happen””” if Link “”fails”” in a previous game. It was so stupid and killed the series for me (I didn’t even play BotW until recently, I was so incensed).
all that was to validate their prequel where the Master Sword has a cringy character inside it (the Solo Star Wars movie did this too, by putting the brain of a loud mouthed, activist, feminist robot into the fans’ beloved Millennium Falcon, ruining all its previous appearances)
And 3) they invalidate Ganon as a villain by making him some genetic offspring of a generic Satan demon villain instead of some reoccurring soul reincarnated cursed with the Triforce of Power.
The idea that Ganon used a power not inherently evil, left behind by the goddesses at the point they left the world, was poignant. The Triforce pieces by itself practically finds the soul that most embodies its essence, and the lone man of the Gerudo embodies power and ambition and wholly. Only when all three are unified is balance restored. They threw away all of that with the demonic heredity of “”Demise””, and now Ganon is some annoying bitch of a true evil instead of THE true evil himself.
@RehnSturm256 If you thought SS was bad, you will really hate ToTK because it somehow made it even worse.
I think the whole downfall timeline was created because OOT was essentially a soft-reboot of the series. It was a prequel and introduced so many recurring elements that weren't present in the games before it. They probably felt the need to justify why they weren't there in the previous games by having them in a separate timeline.
I was also hesitant to play BoTW, but that's because it always felt like a generic open-world survival game with a Zelda skin on top of it. It seemed like every other game was becoming open world after people got sick of the linear corridor shooters.
I haven't seen much of it, but it feels like they became a victim of their own success and just did BotW with a gimmick:tm: rather than actually bothering to iterate (and BotW needed iteration upon.) Which sucks because now they'll just shit out BotW with a gimmick:tm: games for the next twenty years instead of actually maybe making something good.
b e a r d
@idiot @xianc78 @RehnSturm256 i think that tears of the kingdom makes breath of the wild look like a tech demo. it's much more expansive and there's really no reason to play botw, at all.
i do like how it went back to miyamoto's original idea for the series though, just exploring and finding little secrets and such all the time. totk does a much, much better job at that than botw did as well.
i also actually really love skyward sword though hahaha, the music is amazing, i love the graphics, i actually really like the story and how it did add a lot of extra expanse to the lore that was pretty intriguing and made other games in the series seem more deep than they originally were. that last bit is what tears of the kingdom really failed to do, instead just kind of throwing it all away and kind of making a mockery out of it in some ways. they could have added so much context but instead were just like "ehhhh whatever just make some new shit based on old shit."
@beardalaxy @idiot @RehnSturm256 I didn't mind the motion controls either. Even as a left-handed person, I'm perfectly comfortable swinging a sword with my right-hand, but with that said, it meant that this Link was canonically right-handed and I always loved how Link was a southpaw. It made him more relatable to me.
@xianc78 @idiot @RehnSturm256 it is pretty unfortunate to see link no longer being a lefty. interestingly, breath of the wild was originally going to have motion controls as well and that's why link's right handed. they couldn't just make him left handed for the sequel all of the sudden. it makes me wonder if the next major zelda game will have link as a lefty again.
@xianc78 @beardalaxy @idiot several big Wii games from around that time didn’t suffer from gameplay, but in story and reworking the series. Not only Skyward Sword, but Metroid Other M for the Metroid series 
Both prequels that told too much, and ruined the whole series for me. But that’s just me.
Although now I’m hearing that BotW is thrown away for the sake of TotK? Um, so any good things I liked about BotW in story or themes doesn’t matter? Man, I hate that, what’s the point of it all? 
i didn’t want to approach the series with the mentality that “nothing matters, turn off brain and enjoy good gameplay”.
@RehnSturm256 @xianc78 @idiot yeah that's totally understandable. i still really fuckin love the game, i'm having a great time with it still and i've definitely put in well over 100 hours at this point. i don't want it to end, i want to keep exploring and finding cool stuff. i still have like 60 shrines to complete lol.
@RehnSturm256 @xianc78 @idiot it's just that the story sucks, but the story was never meant to be a huge part of the game anyway. it's a lot different if you have a game like the last of us and the story sucks, because the story is the main draw of the game and the gameplay is just kind of there to make it a game instead of a movie. zelda is a game first and foremost, and a really fun one at that.
@beardalaxy @xianc78 @idiot yeah, I’m probably gonna get TotK 
i am sold on BotW, and if the sequel builds upon it, all the better. I’ll just…try not to look into the memories or story too much 
abd maybe one of these days I’ll play Skyward Sword, and get a better understanding of how it ties in to the games. Maybe I’ll actually like it 
@beardalaxy @idiot @xianc78 i think Zelda was better the less that was said about the lore. If a game tries to be a distant sequel to another is one thing, like WW and OoT, but the prequel thing and Fi and Demise was not to my preferences, because it cemented too much lore for a series in which each game tried to have its own identity. Now, no matter what a game does, it is always tied back to SS’s events. Set in stone. I dislike this 
maybe if SS had the greatest story ever told I’d be more receptive to it.
@idiot @xianc78 @RehnSturm256 (and yes, i even like the motion controls in SS, i think they're actually done pretty well and in hindsight believing journalists that they were bad was pretty funny)