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7/9/2025, 5:08:00 PM
>>714973713
For me, caves and "seamless" mainline dungeons made it way closer to being the kind of "True Zelda but Open World" I wanted. It helps that on the way to dungeons, there's sometimes steps that felt very Zelda-like. Zora region has a bit of a quest-chain between NPCs and eventually takes you to a pre-dungeon area (The Zora Waterworks) which has its own little gimmick about raising the water level. In the desert there's the Tower Defense portion and then a part where you have to triangulate 3 puzzles to make the pyramid appear where the dungeon is. The bosses are completely unique to each theme instead of the "[Element]-Ganons" from BotW or the sameness of the Divine Beasts.
The fact that you could "bump" into Dungeons like in ALttP and actually go inside them without being able to make your way through them properly yet, also contributed to the "Zelda feeling".
The Sky Islands were disappointing but I loved the Wind Wakerness of, for example, the one with all the mirrors inside it, where you're doing Mirror-shield gameplay in a more BotW kind of way.
In every way TotK felt like a step towards what BotW should've been IMO. The only thing that is bad is that they kept Shrines and Korok Seeds while also quantifying the new elements like the Caves (54 of them), the Signpost Dudes (50 of them), the Musicians who need to be driven around with homemade vehicles (5 of them), and the Lost Koroks who have to be transported (about 100 of the Korok Seeds)
It furthered the Ubisoftification that was already happening with BotW, and is exactly not what "Open World Zelda" should be.
But this doesn't make BotW superior to TotK just because it had less of it. It still did Ubisoft quantification and "Towers", and for that reason it must be marked as a failure.
For me, caves and "seamless" mainline dungeons made it way closer to being the kind of "True Zelda but Open World" I wanted. It helps that on the way to dungeons, there's sometimes steps that felt very Zelda-like. Zora region has a bit of a quest-chain between NPCs and eventually takes you to a pre-dungeon area (The Zora Waterworks) which has its own little gimmick about raising the water level. In the desert there's the Tower Defense portion and then a part where you have to triangulate 3 puzzles to make the pyramid appear where the dungeon is. The bosses are completely unique to each theme instead of the "[Element]-Ganons" from BotW or the sameness of the Divine Beasts.
The fact that you could "bump" into Dungeons like in ALttP and actually go inside them without being able to make your way through them properly yet, also contributed to the "Zelda feeling".
The Sky Islands were disappointing but I loved the Wind Wakerness of, for example, the one with all the mirrors inside it, where you're doing Mirror-shield gameplay in a more BotW kind of way.
In every way TotK felt like a step towards what BotW should've been IMO. The only thing that is bad is that they kept Shrines and Korok Seeds while also quantifying the new elements like the Caves (54 of them), the Signpost Dudes (50 of them), the Musicians who need to be driven around with homemade vehicles (5 of them), and the Lost Koroks who have to be transported (about 100 of the Korok Seeds)
It furthered the Ubisoftification that was already happening with BotW, and is exactly not what "Open World Zelda" should be.
But this doesn't make BotW superior to TotK just because it had less of it. It still did Ubisoft quantification and "Towers", and for that reason it must be marked as a failure.
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