#games #zelda #botw #totk #cohost-repost
2023-07-19

i feel like a lot of people see Tears of the Kingdom as a console zelda game, and not a handheld zelda game, because Breath of the Wild was... not very good at threading that needle. But once I realized it was actually a Game Boy Zelda I started to enjoy it way more.

So much of it exists to be 5-10 minute sub-tasks that you can just, put down. You can play it between subway stops and it's fine. And this seems to drive most critics and a whole lot of gamers up a wall, but like... I don't have that much time in my life for Gaming anymore, at least, that isn't with the people I play games with in my limited time blocks for it.

it lacks overarching stuff, because it knows it's going to be played as a handheld game as much as a console game. In some ways imo it's overcorrecting for Breath of the Wild being more console than handheld (though, to be clear, Shrines-as-shrines-instead-of-dungeons is a big part of why BotW worked as a handheld game too -- you could just do a shrine when you didn't have A Lot of Time)

And you can see this if you look at my Hero's Journey map mode - lots of disparate things where I fast travel, do a thing, save and quit, and then do it again. Instead of long unbroken lines. I rarely run out of things to do, because I don't do them all at once, and instead end up doing the same things in different areas, over and over. I'm not sure I'll bore of the game -- I play it more like someone visiting a city than someone living in the city, my map of it is the area around transit stops, not the city as a whole. And it feels like it was designed for that, for better and for worse.

Finding your place in the world involves figuring out how to co-exist with the rest of the ecosystem. Some of that means playing games the way they're structured instead of the ways you expect them to play. No shade to the people who try to coerce the game into what they want, just, it's a thing that seems to have been systematically forgotten. We've gotten too used to shaping things to our needs, even when that hasn't worked out particularly well the last decade plus. But that's not how reality works.

Sometimes you just need to read the room.

I guess I also just remember a time where handhelds were what you played in the interstitial time instead of Sitting Down For Hours In A Fugue State in the way (especially the steam deck) handheld games seem to expect today, especially when so many of the switch games end up being cross-platform with actual consoles.

Microtransactions are def partially to blame for that -- more time in seat means more purchasing, statistically, and more players online keeping other players in their seats to buy more.

I guess I just long for when games respected my time, at least in one of their forms.