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Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom and the crux of modern gaming
I eagerly pirated Tears of the Kingdom when it was first released on the piracy scene way back in 2023.
I opted to try it on the steam deck and when it ran like shit, I tried it on my gaming PC, where it also mostly ran like shit.
This foreplay went out for quite some time before I decided to shell out some $70+ dollars to play it on the Switch. Naturally,
this was driven by an ecstatic desire to play it. After mostly enjoying Breath of the Wild and being a big fan of the Zelda series
in general, I thought TOTK with all of its glowing reviews and widespread acclaim would be able to satisfy my desire for a new experience.
I was still in the mindset that modern games could still offer me something that could somehow spark joy or inspire something within me.
Unfortunately, this wasn’t the case.
I eagerly played it for 10 hours, progressing beyond the initial tutorial stage and setting foot back into the main world of Hyrule. Naturally, there were expansions of the terrain, you could go up into the sky or down into an underworld style realm. There were various sidequests that accompanied the main quest of finding the Princess. You could find apples for X NPC or you could clear out moblins for Y NPC. I don’t really recall the specifics but I could generally parse out that there was something bothering me. I got to a dungeon, though I’m not sure if it counts as the first or not. The Rito Village quest about getting into the sky and taking the dungeon out did interest me initially. Getting to it felt more like a hassle than anything I would consider fun or enjoyable. Platforming in the sky felt like more of a puzzle than I wanted it to. Perhaps even moreso than the actual dungeon itself. This was mixed in with various cutscenes, which irked me in Breath of the Wild but did even moreso now. There was something grating in the voice acting and storyline that I just couldn’t stomach. It felt contrived and unserious, more like watching a saturday morning cartoon conversation go down than anything you could take seriously. I could compare this to various other games in the series without spoken dialogue. I can see in my mind’s eye the final conversation with Saria before leaving the Deku Woods in OoT or the Grandma from Wind Waker lamenting missing both Link and his sister in her state of delirium and sickness. These things grabbed me emotionally and from a story standpoint. I could go on about various details like that but it seems the transition from a written perspective to heavy cutscene dialogue just doesn’t land for me.
I played through that first dungeon and definitely beat it, though I have very little memory about the mechanics or the final dungeon boss. I recall hopping around and timing bow shots perfectly or something to that degree. Afterwards, with the boss defeated and the dungeon completed, I was forced to sit through a story cutscene that I absolutely detested. Not because it was all that bad, but that I just didn’t have the patience or commitment to actually sit there and see it in its entirety. I was completely uninvested. None of these characters really mattered to me and I felt like I was just ticking off boxes for the next story plot point. I actually hit the plus button to skip it because I was so annoyed and underwhelmed with it. I don’t know exactly why but based on the feeling in my gut I don’t think the game designers really cared much about having a good story or at least good writing that would tie the player into the game. Gameplay is important of course but I mostly felt like I was expected to do my own things or sandbox my way into enjoying the game. Maybe if I was younger or had a different mindset about how a video game should be I would’ve enjoyed it more. When breath of the wild came out I was different person. Younger and uninhibited by what I now understand about the world or about myself. Now, I don’t really value or care about the mindset that guided this game’s development structure. The story, gameplay, and world all bother me to the point where I don’t want to finish it or dive anywhere near it. I’m sure the developers had good intentions and they were obviously rewarded for it with blockbuster sales numbers for the game.
I think going forward the Zelda series will continue in this direction. Perhaps expanding out the amount of gameplay options the player has for playing the game. The things I disliked about this game experience are merely a symptom of a larger problem in the game industry, not something I can point to as the cause. It’s just what people want nowadays and what they’re willing to pay for. I don’t think the experiences I had as a kid with video games will help me move forward with the modern mindset of having video games be these glowing, modern blockbuster masterpieces that take so many hours to complete. There’s many causes for this and I understand this is merely a natural progression of society and technology placing more expectations on what is and isn’t entertaining based on what computing can do. I’ve heard the argument numerous times that indie games can do what modern AAA companies can’t and create actual meaningful experiences that are simple and fun. This is true to an extent and I believe that they are the real future for anyone serious about video games. What I can’t square is the idea that video games need to be more than what they are: fun little diversions from real life that don’t take too much of your time and energy. Ocarina of Time and other older titles took about 20 or so hours to finish up. Not to mention their simple graphics and interfaces. I just don’t understand the need for drawing people into these massive experiences. Is life so devoid of meaning that you have to pour all your hours and energy into these virtual worlds just to feel something similar to a sense of meaning?
When games don’t leave you feeling drained and paralyzed by indecision it’s a fine time. When they do, it becomes a problem for everybody. Maybe I’m the only one that feels that way but I can’t imagine that others don’t.