Tears of the Kingdom: Signs Point To Kakariko

[aubergion]

If it weren't for the quest marker, I would never have ridden west.

 

Every plot hook at Woodland Stable points east, towards Kakariko Village, and I had no way of actually knowing which way Princess Zelda was. But the map pointed me due west. So, despite feeling like I was horribly metagaming, I did ride west, just to see what the game wanted from me. The horse import was very convenient. With my five-spur Inqy, the journey took no time at all. Given that what the game wanted was to introduce me to the new replacement for the Sheikah towers, I think I made the right call!

Teen Purah is throwing me off a bit, but I do like the boost a few years of maturity seem to have given her. I wonder how much of her aging is the passage of time and how much is her tinkering again. It does seem like it'd take at least a few years for all the infrastructure to be set up. The materials caches for Ultrahand courtesy of Hudson & company are a nice touch. And it's good to know that all the swords got eaten by the Gloom, as the new Malice is called. Makes me feel a little better about my poor old Master Sword, wherever it may be.

Overall, I don't think this sequence is any more or less linear than the suggestion to go see Impah post-Great-Plateau, It just felt a lot more jarring because Rauru didn't tell me where to go, the pin on my Purah Pad told me the next stop on my quest was Lookout Landing with zero in-world justification. I think this could have been handled a lot more deftly, especially since Purah herself is the next NPC to talk to and the console-analogue I'm wielding is a Purah Pad. Some sort of "please return this to Purah" auto-alarm, like a lost cell phone. It's a prototype, that'd be a reasonable feature to build in.

The Skyview Towers are so much fun! And I lowkey love that the Guardian tech lives on in those weird creepy arms, and that Link stops being freaked out after his first round getting plugged in, and then being able to reuse them to paraglide - perfection! It's so good! Paraglider my beloved, I missed you so much.

The Deeps was very unexpected - I don't think the trailers showed it like, at all? (But I wasn't paying super close attention to the trailers). It honestly reminds me almost exactly of the caves in Don't Starve. The pitch darkness, the light flowers and fireflies, the dangerous enemies around every corner (no spiders yet though). One complaint - there doesn't seem to be a way out without fast travel? I was really hoping that there would be like, a lift or a rope or something that would indicate to me how anyone else who ends up down here gets out. This feels like one more way in which the devs perhaps over-relied on the shrines. It's a lot easier to get stuck and be forced to fast travel or reload in TotK than in BotW.

The signposts point quite strongly towards Hebra at this point, but I'm in the mood to wander. So I headed east, and picked up the Barbarian armor, a couple shrines, and the Eldin Canyon and Sahasra Slope towers - Eldin via Recalling myself into the sky, and Sahasra via fast travel back to Great Sky Island followed by throwing myself off the edge. From Sahasra, I spotted the familiar outline of Kakariko Village, and decided to go where, if I'd been properly roleplaying, Link would have headed from the start. So I started paragliding down. And then this happened.

For all that I've been critiquing this game quite a lot, it's hard to match the sheer wonder of catching a star fragment in midair.

Comments

[canadian_jay]

Oooh star fragment!! And GOD yeah, forgot to mention on the previous comment, but the changed skyline was *so cool*. Like, it's really throwing in a like... "oh, this is the world I knew... but changed" feeling, very strongly. (And then getting to Lookout Landing and people *knowing me*, was so good!)

Do you find you get stuck and need to fast travel more?? I've like, hardly used the teleports at all, and only ever when I'm like "OK, done here for now, I'd really like to get back to [somewhere halfway across Hyrule]". IIRC, the Getting Out Of The Depths is by hot air balloon! There's a balloon hanging out beside the chasm before Robbie goes down / after Robbie comes back up, but not while he is down there. (I left him sitting down there for like, several days, lmao.) Can't remember if I actually saw it in the depths when he was down there, though.

The BotW horse import made me SO happy!! I was so excited to see Midnight again, and hadn't had ANY hint or tease that they were doing that. ;_;

The guardian arms were so good dkjs;kfl and the yeeting is great fun.

Like I said last night, because of where I landed and the stable I first went to, I ended up heading to Lookout Landing very naturally, without even realizing I had a quest marker for there. Totally agree that a "please return to Purah" thing would have been a more diegetic way of doing that, given that yeah, Rauru gives you nothing to go on.

(Also, I can't remember how I got Sahasra tower, whether I approached from the ground or the sky, but I definitely didn't deliberately teleport up to then fling myself down. XD)

I'm probably (definitely) not going to be making posts on my own DreamWidth b/c I only logged in now to be able to comment, lol, but without getting too in depth or spoilery, my current opinions/impressions are like:
+ seems like a bigger emphasis on puzzles & exploring & set-pieces as challenges versus combat, tho when combat/monsters appear there's more variety, than in BotW;
+ more story and I think more *depth* to the story (and the sidequests!) than in BotW which is wonderful, and there seems to be like... more moving pieces? involved in the telling of the main story, which is also v cool
+ I'm trying to Not Think too hard about "where did all the ancient sheikah shrines go" so that I don't get bogged down worrying about it and negatively impact my immersion, but it is also always delightful when I encounter bits and pieces OF the ancient guardians and stuff (and because I know that they don't typically do Direct Sequel games in the LoZ franchise and the timelines are infamously wonky, lol)
- I was a little disappointed when the main quest, after the preliminaries were done, was like "aaaaand go to the four different areas! again!". Haven't done any of those yet, so maybe they'll feel different than the Divine Beasts, but it didn't strike me as a bit *too* same-y to BotW. (As did re-using the shrines, tbh, when I first ran into them, but they feel a lot more optional and more spaced out, and I can admit the usefulness of them in gameplay.)
+ Not sure if you've run into any Great Fairies yet, but the unifying conceit behind their locations in this game is making me laugh
+ The backpacking koroks are hilarious