The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom

[mfnick]

6 hours ago, one-armed dwarf said:

has a bit more structure, more direction early on.

That sound a lot more appealing! 
 

Ive actually started BOTW again (the controls stink!!!! But I can tell there’s something there). Way I see it, if it clicks this time, great! If not I’ll sell it and use that money to at least try this. Will probably only cost me a fiver lol. 

[DisturbedSwan]

GI.Biz: Tears of the Kingdom is the second biggest Nintendo launch in UK history

 

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The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom is the second biggest Nintendo launch in UK history

The new Switch game soars and is the biggest week for a Zelda game in UK charts history

 

The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom is the biggest boxed video game launch of the year in the UK.

GfK also reveals that the game is Nintendo's second biggest release in UK history by revenue, behind 2008's Wii Fit. If we discount the Balance Board price, it is actually the biggest Nintendo release by revenue. In terms of units, the game only lags behind Wii Fit and combined sales of Pokémon games (namely: combined sales of Sun and Moon, and Scarlet and Violet).

 

Biggest Nintendo UK Launches (Week One Revenue)

 

1. Wii Fit + Balance Board (Wii - 2008)
2. The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom (Switch - 2023)
3. Pokémon Scarlet + Violet (Switch - 2022)
4. Pokémon Sun + Moon (3DS - 2016)

Biggest Nintendo UK Launches (Week One Unit Sales)

1. Pokémon Sun + Moon (3DS - 2016)
2. Pokémon Scarlet + Violet (Switch - 2022)
3. Wii Fit + Balance Board (Wii - 2008)
4. The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom (Switch - 2023)

 

Its opening week sales eclipse the boxed sales of Hogwarts Legacy by more than 50%. This is just boxed sales, and Hogwarts, which was released on PC, PS5 and Xbox Series S and X in February, did have a very strong digital launch. Switch digital sales are typically much lower than the other platforms, so it's unknown if the game outsold Hogwarts overall (Nintendo doesn't share digital data with the charts companies).

 

It is easily the biggest Zelda launch in history, selling more than 2.7 times the opening week sales of Breath of the Wild from 2017.

 

Biggest Zelda Game Launches (UK Week One Sales, Physical Only)

 

1. The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom (Switch - 2023)
2. The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (Switch + Wii U - 2017)
3. The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker (Wii - 2003)
4. The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess (Wii - 2006)
5. The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time (N64 - 1998)
6. The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword (Wii - 2011)
7. The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword HD (Switch - 2021)
8. The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening (Switch -2019)
9. The Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks (DS - 2009)
10. The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time 3D (3DS - 2011)

 

It is already the eighth biggest Zelda game of all time, ahead of 2011's Skyward Sword on Wii and 2003's The Wind Waker on GameCube. In terms of revenue, it is actually the fourth biggest Zelda game of all time, behind 1998's Ocarina of Time, 2006's Twilight Princess and Breath of the Wild.

 

It's not quite the biggest Switch launch of all time, although it comes pretty close. Its opening week sales were 12% lower than last year's Pokémon Scarlet and Violet release. That's in unit sales, when it comes to revenue, Zelda is the biggest Switch release ever, with revenue up 8% over Scarlet and Violet. There was a popular limited edition of Tears of the Kingdom, which carried a price of over £100, which helped pull up the revenue figures.

 

The popularity of Tears of Kingdom has actually boosted its predecessor, Breath of the Wild. That game rose 31% in boxed sales week-on-week and is at No.8 in the charts this week.

 

Biggest Zelda Games (UK All-Time Sales, Units)

 

1. The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (Switch - 2017)
2. The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess (Wii - 2006)
3. The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time (N64 - 1998)
4. Link's Crossbow Training (Wii - 2007)
5. The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass (DS - 2007)
6. The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time 3D (3DS - 2011)
7. The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening (Switch - 2019)
8. The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom (Switch - 2023)
9. The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword (Wii - 2011)
10. The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker (GameCube - 2003)

 

 

[Metroid66]

Without really thinking about it I sort of ended up in a temple (which are what dungeons are called here). I was quite enjoying just messing around and exploring, but I must have switched off, followed a bit of a plot thread and bang, I'm facing some aggressive Zelda puzzling and a mighty (almost overwhelming, given my paucity of hearts) boss.

 

Muddled through and now I have

Spoiler

A very handy summons.

And, in fine Zelda tradition, a nice new heart!

[one-armed dwarf]

I beat one of those yesterday as well, the same one I presume.

 

This is a very subjective nit pick, but I wish it was easier to get around without fast travel. I liked how progressing through BOTW felt contiguous and you could do it without FT, but in this you need to go up to the sky islands often enough to get vehicle bits. Also my balloons break before I can get out of the depths, there seems to be a timer or distance mechanic for how long that they last. The game generally seems designed around the idea you will FT quite a bit, due to the resources and huge heights of everything. But it always just feels a bit lame to me to use FT in a game as well crafted as this.

 

I did at one point last night spend ages building a sort of jet that would take me from sky island to a big flying tower in the distance. Finally got the altitude and speed correct, jumped out and ditched the jet for youtube views, glided over and drank a bunch of potions to increase stamina and speed to climb up it. Ascended a bit. Finally at the top I 

Spoiler

lifted a rock and found a korok and got one korok seed 🤣

I love that though, I'm not complaining. It's all about the journey in these games.

[OCH]

I've got about 15 seeds at the minute. I can tell it will be miserable to seek them all out.

 

I must admit, I'm not really travelling by vehicle. I'm gaining altitude and gliding for the most part. Using the sky islands as a vantage point. I've only really created makeshift vehicles in the context specific shrines. Although I did improv one of those shrines. Building a massive bridge over a gap, as opposed to use these motorised wheel thingies to make a "car".

[spatular]

The first vehicle i tried to over engineer wouldnt even move. Skateboard with a fan on it worked fine.

[HandsomeDead]

I had to build a vehicle for a certain bit.  There were loads of different parts to use and I built a big, rocket powered monster truck type thing.  I was rubbing my hands thinking about how fast it'll go but once I started it up it just backflipped itself upside down 🙃

[OCH]

I added a rocket to a fan attached vehicle.. Don't

 

[DisturbedSwan]

Going into this I was excited and yes the hype did run away with me, but I was also quite trepidatious as even though I very much enjoyed BotW and thought it was a great game overall, I wasn't as euphoric about it as many on here and those in the greater gaming sphere were/are really. The information on this going in wasn't really plentiful, I read some spoilers from the Art Book (nothing story related) to try to get a gauge on if there was enough in this that would keep my interest and it wasn't just BotW with a slightly different map and building mechanics. My main huge complaint with BotW was the lack of proper deep multi-levelled Zelda dungeons, but I did have a lot of nit-picks with it too, the weapon degradation, the lack of climbing when it rains, the lack of enemy variety, how sparse the world was with very few towns, mainly little things and the one big thing alluded to above that added up to a great rather than an incredible game for me.

 

So, with all that being said, I've been playing this quite a bit since Saturday, not sure how many hours exactly but it's probably in the 10-15 hour range. I purposely waited to post my thoughts because I wanted to get the surface first to see how things are there as I was most worried about how I'd find it being back in the familiar Hyrule from BotW. The game starts off very strongly, I loved absolutely everything about the Prologue, the mysteries around the plot itself and the Sky Islands themselves are all absolutely fantastic.

 

The Sky Islands are such a great microcosm of the game to start off on, with you getting and using all the basic abilities right off the bat, lots of Zonai Constructs which dole out a lot of tutorials on the various different game systems, new and old, lots of different crafts ready made for you to be able to tinker with or help pilot you to your goal. It's similar to BotW's Great Plateau in that you're exploring a little microcosm of the entire game and have to go to three different Shrines to pick up the different abilities in order to proceed and get to Hyrule itself, but still a lot different, there's a lot more verticality and visually it's just a lot more of an interesting place to be than the placid green fields of the Great Plateau, in the entirety of the Sky Islands I've explored so far (there are a vast array of them but this one big area acts as the Prologue area, as far as I can tell anyway) all the enemies are new as well, they're these new Zonai enemies, some have a hodgepodge of fused weapons, some attack with a sword and shield and the slightly more dangerous ones have this kind of Whip that can catch you out really quickly if you're not careful. I also encountered a mini-boss battle here with a stone-cube creature where I had to shoot at his one glowing cube repeatedly to put him down.

 

All the little puzzles to get up to the Shrines are great, a lot of them its heavily implied what you need to do, as there will be a lake next to you with ready made boats or something, hinting that you need to do this to get to the other side, or there will be loads of wooden planks near a gap between platforms that informs you you need to build a bridge. It just feels good to build something in this game, even something simplistic, I don't know what it is, I'm not really creative at all but building stuff in this game feels good, I don't think I'm ever going to build some of the monstrosities and complex huge behemoths I've already seen being made on social media, but, yeah, even the basic stuff I'm able to make and experiment with has been really fun so far and probably the biggest genuine surprise of the game as I expected this to be a negative, but at the moment it's definitely a positive for me.

 

The abilities overall are just a lot more inventive and more exciting than the ones in BotW, Ascend is perhaps the most 'out there' of them all, being able to crawl up through vast swathes of rock to come out on the top of some platform with some cool vista, rewinding time on certain little objects with recall, being able to fuse weapons together with fuse and lastly being able to build pretty much anything to your hearts content with ultrahand is pretty damn amazing, as touched on above it just feels intuitive and so good to use all these abilities. With that being said though, I can see Ascend and Ultrahand being my two most used abilities with recall and fuse not really getting that much use yet, I think I just haven't really found many spots to use recall and most weapons I pick up are already fused (Axes, Hammers etc.) so I haven't really used Fuse all that much either. 

 

I reached the surface last night and unfortunately I hit the ground with a bump. Being back in Hyrule it immediately brought up a lot of the negative thoughts I had with BotW really, the hand holding and decent turorials of the Sky Islands were gone, instead I'm left bewildered in this huge open world, everything on the map greyed out, no idea where to go aside from one dot on the map that marks the next story point. Perhaps stupidly, I decide to ignore that and go off exploring only to find that things are still quite similar to BotW here unfortunately, the same boring Bokoblin enemies, the same Lizalfos, the same Stone Golems in a world that is mostly similar to the previous game, just bigger and more kooky (so far at least).

 

There are a couple of cool huge enemies I've encountered and managed to take down that weren't in the previous game which is a plus though, the world is still fun to explore and I am still engrossed in it but I forgot how frustrating BotW (and this) are at times. I've been repeatedly killed by a variety of creatures, I've spent an hour on a Shrine repeatedly dying due to fall damage before throwing in the towel, I spent an hour trying to retrieve soft toys for a vendor by a river only to discover I was going about it the wrong way, worst of all though is you still cannot climb stuff when it's raining!!! Absolute bollocks, I fucking hate having to stand at the bottom of something I'm trying to climb waiting for the rain to stop, it's just shit. Solving that soft toy quest on my own, realising I was using the wrong ability all that time and overthinking the solution was a cool moment though likewise when I ran into another NPC that needed a signpost propped up when I engineered a little solution for him and the post stood up on its own. It's a similar feeling to finishing an Ikea flat-pack build (about as DIY as I get in real life), just a nice little feeling that you managed to build something that helped this NPC out, it's satisfying. 

 

So yeah, I don't think I'm anywhere near as far in as the rest of you and it's early days in Hyrule itself but after the highs of Skyrule it's down to Earth with a bump in Hyrule really, I am still very much enjoying it, I am utterly engrossed at times and yesterday was the first day since I've had my OLED Switch that the battery has been entirely drained, but yeah those BotW negatives which are still present in this game so far are holding this back again for me which is a real shame, but I guess maybe I shouldn't of expected a complete reinvention of the wheel in the first place. The building stuff is bloody amazing though, which is my biggest surprise with this. I love everything to do with Skyrule, it's just Hyrule which has been a bit of a mixed bag so far, but it's still very early days, this game is ridiculously big. 

Pics/Vids:

 

Spoiler

 

 

 

 

[mmmark]

 

Only joking. I do have some advice for you though @DisturbedSwan because I did the same thing when first landed on hyrule. 
 

Do the first few main missions until you’re given the glider. I didn’t and the first shrine I came across I needed it at the end 🤦🏻‍♂️

[one-armed dwarf]

What's good about TOTK is that handholding actually funnels through everything in the game. If you look around, you will sometimes find a bunch of vehicle parts next to a goblin camp (for instance). Or other vehicles to solve other problems. Sometimes enemies will have fusions that you didn't think of yourself, like a shield that knocks you on your arse if you try to hit it (wont spoil how to make this). Everything in these, and the shrines, are designed to teach the player what is possible and give them the knowledge needed to build off of themselves. 

 

I'm going to (slightly) push you in a certain direction though, follow the main path a bit. Stop exploring, you need to do a few main quests before you get a little something which makes things clearer (you'll know what it is, it's the thing you don't have yet). But in general near every issue people had with BOTW being directionless is largely solved in TOTK, IMO, but without entirely sacrificing the freedom to roam around. It's just less about finding views than it is about finding resources and learning new traversal/fusing tricks (which lets you get around even more)

 

It might have the same enemies but there's lots of new ways of fighting and interacting with them. Personally I've been using a lot of MGS in my playthrough, and throwing smoke bombs that follow the direction of the wind and doing lots of sneakstrike. But you've got to kinda take your time with the game, look at the shit you have in your bag and think if there's a combination of effects that can be leveraged. These games still expect a lot of scavenging and tinkering with things, sometimes some random seeds or chu chu jelly can be a ton more effective than straight up fighting, especially early on

 

edit there you go, both me and mmmark are here to tell you that you are playing video games wrong 🤣

[mmmark]

🙌 😅

[DisturbedSwan]

Haha cheers chaps, I'll follow the main questline for a bit later tonight then and that should make things easier for myself, explains why I kept repeatedly dying of fall damage in the Shrine now as well 😂

[mfnick]

A quick question, does the ascend ability mean a lot less climbing in this one? Playing BOTW at the moment and my God the climbing is so fucking slow and boring. Not to mention just as I reached the top of a pillar it rained and killed me. Fucking bullshit. 

[OCH]

At the moment, Ascend makes traversal indoors a lot easier and faster (they also hide plenty of Ascend-only chests if you pay attention). I've had four upgrades so far and only done one stamina extension. It hasn't really affected my exploring so far. But also because food/recipes is more intuitive this time.

[one-armed dwarf]

So even tho I'm all about the pro hud life, I only recently learned that the standard hud in BOTW actually has a weather forecast on the bottom of the screen. So you can tell when it's going to rain. Basically the whole thing with BOTW is you do a bit of prep when going to do things, stamina/speed potions, fireguard, stuff like that. The way the wind blows affects the speed of your glider and stuff. So if it's going to rain you need to account for this too and plan differently, tho I wish there was a way of doing that with pro hud.

 

TOTK is still a game very much about prep and thinking how to use your resources and knowing your environment, tho there's a new mechanic for dealing with slippery surfaces as well. Climbing is not as big a focus considering the new ways you have to get around, tho it's something you need to do at times and it's good to have a few speed/stamina elixirs for that.

 

Basically, get cooking. In both BOTW and TOTK

[mfnick]

Urgh. 

[OCH]

Beat my first dungeon!

 

Considering who the boss was*, I'm assuming in spite of this being open world. This was supposed to be the first boss?

Spoiler

*Gohma

7 Heart containers now. Alongside some armour that actually means I don't immediately die when a stronger enemy hits me. One thing I remember doing in BOTW was seeking out the map completion (I did the same with Elden Ring, to be fair). Except now they've decided to be a little clever with it and create area specific obstacles that prevent you from knocking out every tower.

[HandsomeDead]

Yeah, I think there is a preferred order.  I've done two, and I think the first one I did was the second as I had a much easier time in the next dungeon.

I'll have to do the others to truly know but some of the enemies around the other areas are tough.

 

I've got the whole map active now.  I did my second dungeon a while back and the rest of the time I've been traveling and doing the towers with the occasional side quest.  I did do the thing to improve your armour because I'm sick of getting bodied by black bokobolins.  

I did try to do more in the underworld but that place is a pain.  I really think it just limits you in a way that makes the game less fun and can be overbearing.

 

Fairly big armour based spoiler:

 

Spoiler

Oh, but I did find some trousers down there which I'm fairly sure are the same as OoT's Ganonforf outfit so I want to get the full set of that.  Could be neat, but it may mean going to the underworld more 😩 

 

Oh, and I also got a Majora's Mask based head piece.  Looks like there's a few Easter egg sort of stuff in this one that I don't really remember from BotW.

 

 

 

[mmmark]

I haven’t done a dungeon yet. I wouldn’t know where to go to start one (dungeon) 😅 That’s not me asking btw. I’m still just pottering about with my 4 hearts. I did die maybe 15 times fighting one of the rock dudes in a cave. Felt epic to win.