Episode 151 - Sacred Octopus Stick - The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom

Expand-a-band-band, podcast stash! Welcome back to the podcast! We
took a bit of an extra long time with this one, but if you’ve
played this game, I imagine you’ll understand why. The Legend of
Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom is a massive open world game and the
sequel to Breath of the Wild, the game that some people said
redefined what open world games should be. To an extent that is
true, and we have already seen a lot of its impact on the genre,
but Tears of the Kingdom adds a pretty significant amount of
innovation on top of that, and some of that stuff is going to be
hard for developers to replicate. And all of that while reusing the
same ground map as Breath of the Wild. Tears of the Kingdom is
huge, yes, adding large new areas to explore and containing
thousands of discrete goals to accomplish from quests to shrines to
dungeons and collectibles, but its most defining feature is a more
fiddly one, specifically the new abilities that let you manipulate
the game’s physics system on an entirely new level than Breath of
the Wild was able to pull off. Ultrahand, Recall and Fuse let you
use the game’s environment more or less to your whims, building
contraptions with prepackaged device spheres to do anything from
driving a car across Hyrule to making an enemy-seeking robot, shoot
arrows imbued with an absurd number of item specific properties and
move objects back and forth through time, opening a ton of
possibilities not just in combat, but in traversal and puzzle
solving. Meanwhile Ascend makes you entirely rethink the way you
look at the game world, the effect of which isn’t dissimilar to Red
Faction’s destructible environments way back in the PS2 era feeling
like a revolutionary upheaval of game systems. The experience of
playing this game is somehow very different from playing its
predecessor, but with a familiarity that makes it feel
simultaneously very comfortable but also tricking you into maybe
not being as blown away as you could be. We’re going to be talking
about our exploration of the mechanics and how our experiences
differed in how and when we realized we could take advantage of our
new abilities, the inclusion of new enemies and dungeons that felt
significantly different from each other and from Breath of the
Wild, and we confirm that the Ganondorf we are talking about is the
shirtless sexy Demon King one. Thank you for joining us this week,
and apologies for the late release! Tears of the Kingdom is
probably going to be one of (if not the) most talked about games
this year, and we aren’t exactly early to the discourse, but I hope
you enjoy the episode. I’m not kidding when I say Ascend has
changed the way I view games, with me thinking I can travel
vertically in everything I play now. It’ll be a while before the
effects of this game wear off on people. What did you think? Was
the game worth the wait since 2017? Did the game make your Switch
catch on fire? Let us know over in our Discord or in the comment
section! Next time, we’re entering into the very well named and not
stupid at all “Spooktember in July” where we’re going to be talking
about Resident Evil VIII (or Village, or 8, I suppose) so we hope
you’ll join us for that.