re: Tears of the Kingdom Discussion Thread **NO SPOILERS**

This is probably a good time to remind folks that your Constructs made with Ultrahand will go away when you close down the game and reload entirely. Just putting your switch to sleep is one thing, but closing the game is another.

I did. However, I shot the Talus with a Muddle Bud arrow, sat back and enjoyed watching the show!

me too. I finally made it out of the dark underworld. I had a crap ton of bright flowers and used them all.

I kept trying to go West and hit dead end mountains. I just followed any light I saw in the end.

I wasn't originally a fan of having to track down the memories like in Botw, but I'll be damned if these aren't 100x better than botw.

There's one I just found that I wanna discuss, but it's way too spoilery. You'll love it when you get it tho.

I didn't even pick up on that. I did see where folks IDed the Chasm locations as having been Sheikah Shrine sites in BOTW, however.

It takes so long to get to the wind temple

This makes me want to actually move forward with the story. I got to the Water Temple entrance just to register the fast travel and then left.

One shotted the wind boss but what a fun fight

Some observations I've had after continuing to play for a number of hours. I would say this game expands upon BotW to the point of where it almost makes BotW pointless to go back to. Outside of the specific shrine puzzles, I can't think of anything BotW offers that is missing in TotK plus TotK offers so much more. They really fleshed out and expanded the world. It feels like there's a lot more to do than just grind shrines and complete the Divine Beasts.

That said, while TotK does almost everything bigger and better than BotW, it is absolutely a retread. The plot is virtually identical to BotW. It's a relatively minimalist story which involves you assisting the different civilizations in Hyrule (Goron, Zora, etc) with some problem to unlock a power that will assist with finding Zelda. The real meat of the story is still told through flashbacks.

In my view it also falls into the trap of making certain things much more difficult in the name of padding out content. For example, want to buy armor from a town? Need to do a long quest chain to unlock the armor shop which sells one piece of gear that is 1 armor point higher than what you are probably already wearing, when you should just be able to go to the shop to buy the armor.

In BotW, the flashbacks were unlocked by visiting specific locations and taking a picture. In ToTK, it's virtually the exact same premise except for you have these giant crop circles that require you get high enough in the air to find a very specific spot that unlocks the memory.

Likewise, virtually every armor piece I've found up to this point only has an armor rating of up to 3 or 4. I assume the reason for this is that the developers intend for you to visit the Great Fairy Fountains to upgrade your armor, but again, the Great Fairy Fountains are locked behind a long quest chain and even then, depending on the gear, some of the resources are ridiculous.

Nintendo doubled down on the weapon durability system. I like the idea of being able to fuse equipment together to make new items, but the act of actually creating said items can be quite tedious, especially when you need to do this for virtually every weapon in the game as outside of what you can find in the depths, most unfused weapons are largely useless.