One of these days I’m going to put in the time to actually get into that series; it looks good… but now I’m going to want to do it in Japanese and it seems like a bit of a pain heh. You enjoying it?
I know what you mean for sure though, early on I was kinda thinking these NPCs all really want to tell me about the same couple things. I get it, things are very open and they want to compensate for someone just talking to a couple random people. Still, it doesn’t get brought up as much, but I think older Zelda games had more memorable NPCs as well?
I’m loving the series, though I have only played in English - I do want to get through it this century after all haha. Cold Steel is next on the list once I’m done with Zelda and there’s been so much foreshadowing for those games across the rest of the series that I’m very interested in how things will play out
I did a bit of research and figured out that it is possible to change TotK to Japanese with the English physical copy so that’s what I’ve done and playing a bit of it like that seemed doable. Might actually encourage me to start using my Anki again (which just went to show the horrible amount of reviews on there to do). I’ll get on top of that and start adding new stuff from playing Zelda I think
Nice, good luck! Yeah I really don’t think reading it is too bad if you don’t mind the occasional lookups. When you hit little cutscenes that might be a bit of a test, though most haven’t been TOO hard in my experience.
瘴気 (しょうき) is miasma; you’ll need to know that sometime and I had an unpleasant start when they hit you with cutscene conversations centered around that from the very start of the game haha. And get ready to see 朽ちる (くちる) applied to every weapon. I think this game finally got me to internalize that one.
Just as a heads up, if you ever decide to read/watch stuff about TotK in English, 瘴気 is translated as gloom in the game. (At least if it is the word used for the red gunk.)
Some more that I instantly realised would come up all the time: 槍(やり) - spear, 斧(おの) - axe, 祠(ほこら) - shrine
The cutscenes aren’t so bad I think - mainly because you can rewatch them at any time. The shrine ending text does give me a bit of grief because I’m not able to read it and take it on board quickly enough before it fades to the next message, but ultimately that’s pretty minor due to how many there are (and how skippable that text is)
Yep! Those were all cases where having played Octopath 2 right before this set me up really well for vocab from this domain. So I’m immediately seeing playing games pay off for other games.
Yeah I think shrine ending text took me a couple goes because the shrines use what I have to think is some slightly Ye Olde Japanese readings and the like, for effect.
Oh I still plan to! …at some point c: I guess I’m just in a Switch break period, it happens for me every now an again with consoles (well I only own Nintendo consoles), that I play the heck out of them for a while and then I don’t touch them for months or years, then the cycle repeats I’m a PC player at heart. However I do plan to get it at some point though cause Splatoon is so fun, I know I’ll be super hooked once I do. But I’m also holding off right now until I’m a bit more relaxed with money currently being somewhat of an issue. My tactic right now is going for cheapish games that I can potentially play for a long time, bonus points if they also allow changing language to Japanese so they can double as study as well; otherwise I tend to play the same stuff I know I have fun with (mostly FFXIV, Deep Rock Galactic or anything else from my Steam library). VNs have been really nice for this so far with the ones we’ve picked: quite affordable and lots of hours of both fun and study. I know Splatoon is for sure one game I’d play for hundreds of hours but oof, that initial game price + nintendo online fee investment kills me atm ;-; . For just one game. I guess Steam sales are both a blessing and a curse.
But I do plan to get it! …eventually! …I promise! just not sure when.
Yeah very understandable! No worries. It’s unfortunate how Nintendo games will just never, ever be sold cheaper. They’re still charging $60 for Splatoon 2 . I guess you can get the physical game a little cheaper sometimes, but it’s nothing great. And I hate consoles having online memberships; this is the only one I’ve ever paid for… 20 per year for this one isn’t so bad, but considering the online experience is really poor and it’s all P2P, it’s obnoxious. Honestly we have a family plan that still has openings so if you reach that point and wanna just give me an email address, no need to give Nintendo more money. I’ve got a few friends already using it too.
They got me with all their limited time events and whatnot though. It’s both cool for the sake of having constant things to look forward to and a little annoying how the Splatoon devs will give you something for a weekend then take it away forever.
I’m also usually a PC player so I feel you there. My problem is when I want to make exceptions, most of my friends are also stuck on PC haha. That, and the ones who have tried it are used to being really good at aiming with a mouse and have bounced hard off the motion controls cause it is a big initial curve.
Anyway hope money stuff gets a little less tight soon; it’s pretty tough for everyone these days
Oh personally I loved the motion controls even if I’m also very used to mouse, I thought it was quite precise and intuitive, liked it a lot. If anything I was grateful it wasn’t like completely… analog stick type of controls tbh .
I appreciate that a lot, that’s really nice of you. Wouldn’t it be an issue what with us being in different regions? I don’t really know how that works though, I’m in Europe. Even then while I really appreciate the gesture, at that point as you say 20 eur a year is affordable and if I could get it too when I get Splatoon, it wouldn’t feel fair for me to take it if I know I can afford it and I just don’t want to, you know? But still, regardless, thanks a lot! I’ll let you know when I finally get it so we can play some games (no paint bucket smh).
Oh yeah I love it, so much better. I can’t use stick controls in shooters. It’s just a big learning curve for people who haven’t used it and I think motion controls in the average person’s mind still have a bad reputation despite the way they really are as close as you can get to mouse accuracy. I’ve seen some really impressive stuff with the steam controller in Counter Strike and the like.
Oh yeah, wasn’t thinking about regions. That could probably be an issue. I just do my best to share it when I can cause my wife and I bought a family plan (gives you up to 8 people) because it was cheaper than even 2 separate normal accounts, and it has like 3 or so empty slots remaining that are totally just going unused.
For my friends reading here who I mentioned this to in the past – I just wanted to share that my wife’s immigration was approved! It seems recently they’ve been processing these much quicker and skipping steps; we were done in about 6 months with a process we were told would take around 2 years, and we didn’t even have to interview. Very good, now we just wait for her permanent resident card to arrive. Thought about tacking on Japanese talk while I’m here but I noticed how close we are to June 1st so I guess I should think a little about if I have much to say for the 2 year mark of my studying. Will be back soon
I don’t think I’ll quite love the game to the extent that others do; I mean I’ve had multiple people tell me it’s the best videogame they’ve ever played, but the experience has gotten a little more positive over time. Some things that bothered me before no longer do as much – I have enough figured out with the sorting presets for getting the parts I want on weapons quickly enough, I’ve reoriented my thinking enough that being able to “break” traversal isn’t so bad because traversal just isn’t the challenge the way it was in BotW, etc. I still don’t make ambitious builds, but the game seems to work well enough for those of us who throw together basic functional devices and move on, little simple cars or hot air balloons. It’s overall a pretty good system for allowing me to slap two things together and have a vehicle but having the depth of interactions for people to build bombers and mechs somehow. Trying to force it to do anything for me when I started was a mistake because you just need to collect some zonai gear first, but who can blame me for wanting to play with the toys? I do think the register and instant rebuild system is really important quality of life, and don’t like the way it could be missable for a really long time. It’s the one thing I just looked up and went straight to when I was fed up with not being able to do it.
Over time it’s opened up quite a bit with the various sidequests, to help with the world not feeling as novel and new – as long as I can keep moving between these set up things to do, it’s staying fresh enough. I still think the underground and sky islands are barren and one note enough that I find them more of a detriment than a solid addition, but there as well I’ve learned that I’ll have more fun if I take them in small chunks, say, go underground when a map points me somewhere for a specific treasure, or just look for a quick sky island with a shrine.
Honestly the worst part for me right now is how easily you get (near) one shot – IIRC this was an issue in BotW, but it’s worse here than I remember it being there. Seems like every enemy’s damage value is either .5 hearts or all 10. I was reading James Stephanie Sterling’s review and agreeing quite a bit that the game can just be a bit mean; you get jumped and instant killed or your rewards fall off a cliff or some tiny issue in the physics sends you hurtling somewhere terrible. All tolerable, but when things go wrong it elicits a few too many sighs.
Still, yeah, I kinda like it. I do think the enemy parts being valuable weapon attachments does so much to solve how combat was almost best to avoid in BotW. Very smart design. Caves are overall cool to explore. There’s a very nice resource loop taking you between various parts of the game that makes me not totally dislike the underground just because it’s cool to spend time preparing for journeys there, then go down and get some zonai upgrade materials, then use those upgrades to improve your ability to get back to exploring, etc. When you figure out how it wants you to act, it flows well from one thing to another. This is about the best outcome I was hoping for; I had to spend quite a bit of time figuring out exactly how the systems want you to work with them and then tailoring my approach to how I can fit that within what will entertain me – but it’s been mostly successful.
I’m at the point where I just skim item descriptions to see what they actually do, but I think I’d be there in English too, haha. The actual dialog has been pretty good for casual reading practice, and I need to do surprisingly few lookups. It has me very excited to move on to more games.
WOOOOOHOOOOO! I’m so happy for you and your wife. What a big thing to have off your backs. So glad it went so fast. I can’t imagine having to wait 2 years, so happy you didn’t have to.
TotK
I’m very much the same. I just throw together whatever is functional and quick.
I think I learned this lesson pretty well in BotW, that it is really important to go after the secondary objectives you get. Because new functions to the sheika slate was locked behind those.
So my first order of business after finishing the first temple was to complete the next go underground quest that unlocked from … I can’t remember her name right now. Also because I wanted Rob… (Rob something, dang, their names are slipping from me right now) to go to his lab so he could give me new things for the TotK slate (I’m losing all their names right now, lol).
In that way, I got the autobuild feature right around when I started to feel like I really wanted one because I’d built 3 or so wagons and wasn’t looking forward to building many more. Plus more and more zonai devices were appearing and I realized I’d want some easy go to machines without needing to build them from scratch each time.
Agreed, after doing more sky islands and more underground, it gets a bit same same for sure. But I also find them a nice variety to do every so often. So like I do sky islands after I activate a tower, and so far I’ve mostly gone underground when I’ve had a bigger side quest there. But recently I got a new one and I just said nope (for now) because I had just spent an extended time down there.
So yeah I very much sprinkle sky and underground in as variety. Same with caves. If I had to pick. I’d probably say I like caves the least, but that is because I early stumbled on a cave with really hard monsters that scared me silly, so now I don’t trust that that won’t happen again.
(It is a cave that you might stumble on while traveling from Lookout Landing to the Rita village. To be a little more specific, but there are plenty of caves on that route, but if anyone has visited that cave, especially if they did as early as me, they would probably know which one I’m talking about.)
I agree. After a while in BotW, I just realized I’d be better off ignoring combat except if it was directly in the way of an obstacle. I’m still engaging regularly with combat I don’t necessarily need to in TotK because I still find I’m trying new things at times. Still trying to perfect my stealth and bow skill (this is my preferred method of combat, kill sentries from afar with head shots and go in and stealth stab all the enemies). But I also like that when my strategy fails in this game, I have so many more options for how to not just slash my through all the enemies. (Although I do that too.)
I wish I had more to say about my own play, but except for playing for like 1.5 yesterday, I haven’t played since Thursday. Was too busy this weekend, but I hope to make some cool progress with multiple things very soon
Now that I’m near the end of the game, I don’t mind seeing one or two things written about the game. (Some Youtube video thumbnails/titles already spoiled most of what I haven’t discovered yet.) I can actually read a post mentioning TokT without fear of spoilers.
Personally, I don’t mind that I was more than halfway through the game before discovering it.
I probably was at least 15–20% of the way through before I received the paraglider.
I think there’s a strong sense of accomplishment and progression to discover these things fairly randomly that I wouldn’t have if they were given up front (like the glider in BotW) or if I saw a video telling me how/where to get them.
I also initially avoided getting any armor reused from BotW until I reached the Goron area and needed heat protection. (I didn’t want to bother with elixirs.) And then that became my primary armor for other areas for a while since it was all I had until I reached the Rito village and got the warm outfit there.
I also didn’t get around to unlocking the great fairies until I had completed all four dungeons…
I mostly avoided combat until I completed enough shrines to have enough hearts to take more than one or two hits.
Considering the enemy scaling as one progresses, having the lower-level enemies be a little weaker wouldn’t hurt.
As opposed to me, who will spend 10 minutes coming up with an elaborate build to try to get from point A to point B only for it to fail miserably, sending Link plummeting into lava. (But in my defense, I didn’t yet know how to use devices from my inventory, so I had limited means.)
Josha, if I remember right.
Make life easier for yourself. Call him Goggles.
Some of those would have been nice for me to get before completing the fourth dungeon…
Overall, I hope Nintendo returns to a more traditional Zelda next. Or at least give us another sprite-based 2D Zelda, like A Link to the Past and The Minish Cap. (I didn’t care for A Link Between Worlds so much, possibly partly because it didn’t use 2D sprites.)
Thank you both, and to all the people reading and liking.
TotK
Yeah, the thing for me with that was that I ended up going after it before I had made enough progress in the game to open more of the questline. It does expect you to keep checking in – kinda wish that followup quest was given immediately because the other possibility is that someone doesn’t look back at Robbie and Joshua to see they’ve updated.
Haha, most caves I’ve gone to have been pretty easy; I wonder if I haven’t seen the one that scared you off yet. They aren’t all so bad!
Personally I’m definitely addicted to bow stuns, but honestly I’m at the point where I’m getting increasingly lazy and now that I have some elemental weapons I keep shocking/freezing enemies to just bully them while they can’t move.
Anyway, hope you get more time to play soon!
In principle I totally agree! I just think that that in particular is a very significant power that crosses some threshold where I want to ensure I don’t get it TOO late. That could very much be because I’m not as into the building as some people though. The paraglider though… that one I might argue needs to be automatic because I’m pretty sure some shrines just don’t function without it? It’s in a weird spot because I think the game is clearly built around it at times but it is technically missable.
I’ve unlocked the fairies and got a good chunk of armor right now, 2 dungeons down (Rito and Zora). Maybe heading for the Gorons soon. I stumbled into the lost woods briefly and sure was lost in those woods, wondering where I’ll get hints to work on that stuff. I do think scaling some early enemies down a bit would help – I know BotW worked similarly where it 's pretty punishing until the moment it just isn’t ever again, so it’s not the worst thing if they repeat that.
Hmm, I still haven’t gone there either… might be time to finally follow up on that soon after I finish aimlessly wandering between shrines and stuff in the northeast.
I know they’ve said this is in some way the new formula for the series so I guess it’s unlikely, but I would very much like that as well. I’ve played plenty of games with heavy inspiration from the series, especially indies taking from 2D Zelda, but it’s never quite the same as what Nintendo is able to do and while I can appreciate this new stuff, I miss it too. I never really gave Skyward Sword a serious playthrough so I’m thinking I should do that sometime after this…
One addition: Too lazy to properly get the screenshot off my Switch (the process is a little annoying) but I was hyped that I managed to catch a falling star midair:
I don’t know if the first shrine I visited on the ground could be accomplished without it, but I couldn’t!
I’m still curious about how to get in (have spent maybe 20 mins trying various things, without having any in-game hints yet). But if anyone knows, don’t tell me!
That reminds me, a certain character who appears in the same town as Robbie and Josha I didn’t encounter until I’d completed three or four dungeons.
Technically I’d be fine with a “Zelda 1” style 2D game with Minish Cap graphics and TotK quests/progression.
The main issue I had with A Link Between Worlds is that all the dungeons are designed to work as your first one, so maybe put some BotW/TotK style level scaling for enemies (which can easily work into any plot).
I did the same just the other day! I was swapping between paragliding and falling to keep close to it, then tried pressing A while paragliding and sure enough Link got it.
I’m a PC player at heart. However I do plan to get it at some point though cause Splatoon is so fun, I know I’ll be super hooked once I do. But I’m also holding off right now until I’m a bit more relaxed with money currently being somewhat of an issue. My tactic right now is going for cheapish games that I can potentially play for a long time, bonus points if they also allow changing language to Japanese so they can double as study as well; otherwise I tend to play the same stuff I know I have fun with (mostly FFXIV, Deep Rock Galactic or anything else from my Steam library). VNs have been really nice for this so far with the ones we’ve picked: quite affordable and lots of hours of both fun and study. I know Splatoon is for sure one game I’d play for hundreds of hours but oof, that initial game price + nintendo online fee investment kills me atm ;-; . For just one game. I guess Steam sales are both a blessing and a curse.
just not sure when.
. I guess you can get the physical game a little cheaper sometimes, but it’s nothing great. And I hate consoles having online memberships; this is the only one I’ve ever paid for… 20 per year for this one isn’t so bad, but considering the online experience is really poor and it’s all P2P, it’s obnoxious. 
.
(no paint bucket smh).
It seems recently they’ve been processing these much quicker and skipping steps; we were done in about 6 months with a process we were told would take around 2 years, and we didn’t even have to interview. Very good, now we just wait for her permanent resident card to arrive. Thought about tacking on Japanese talk while I’m here but I noticed how close we are to June 1st so I guess I should think a little about if I have much to say for the 2 year mark of my studying. Will be back soon 
