Hello and welcome to The Back Page Video Games Podcast. I’m Samuel Roberts and I’m joined as ever by Matthew Castle. Hello. Matthew, I’ve got an update for the listeners on something quite key. So by the time people are listening to this, I have hopefully won my eBay bid for Steel Battalion with the controller at the paid for by our lovely patrons at patreon.com/backpagepod. I promise that when I paid my taxes, which I have done this week incorrectly and I have to redo. Oh, shit. Yeah, I missed one month of the thing and you’ve got to, it’s like a whole thing, isn’t it? It’s, yeah, it’s, you know, slightly painful, but not too bad. Very privileged position to be in, of course. I’ve, I’m gonna goddamn buy Steel Battalion. It won’t be in the box, sadly, so I can’t do an unboxing, but it is tested and proved to be working. So it’s gonna happen. I’m gonna play Steel Battalion. The Steel Battalion episode will hopefully happen at some point in the next like, I don’t know, two or three months. Probably in July or August or something when things calm down. I’m gonna play this damn game with this preposterous mech controller and see how it goes. What do you think of that? That’s amazing. We should save it for a week where something really important’s happening, just to spite it. Like, Starfield week should be the week that we play Steel Battalion and only talk about Steel Battalion. Yeah, you’re there thinking, oh, would it be good if they did an episode on Bethesda RPGs? And then it’s like, nope, we’re gonna do an episode on a two decade old Capcom game that no one played. That’s fantastic. So, I’m assuming that has to play on an original Xbox. It does. And herein lies some of the ambiguity here, right? Because I don’t know how I plug that into my regular TV. I have an original Xbox in my flat. I got my old one back. But I might need to do some cable gubbins to get this working. It could be a whole journey. It could be an odyssey. This could be like a years long process, but hopefully not. I’m hoping I can find some way to plug it in and enjoy it. But yeah, and then I imagine after three or four months, I’ll have the ultimate bias remorse and need to get rid of it. But what are two or three months, you know? You are going to be tripping over that thing in your flat and you are going to curse its name. Which button are you looking forward to pressing the most first? Eject, obviously, because it’s inside a little glass case that you lift up. That’s the part I’m most excited about. I think that’s accurate, which as mentioned on a previous episode, the developer wanted to make it actually made of glass. So you’d have to shatter it to reach the eject button, which says everything about the ethos behind that game. So, you know, this is perhaps the dumbest thing I’ve ever spent money on, but I will say that I’m investing the rest wisely. It’s just going straight into my savings to eventually buy a house. So, you know, it’s a bit of a, you know, a bit of like karmic balance there with the universe, hopefully. How are you spending your Patreon funds, Matthew? I know you bought PSVR too with it. Anything else kind of nice in the offing? Uh, just sort of sweets and being a bit blase with Deliveroo. More blase than I would be if I didn’t have Patreon. Nice. I’ve never been a very good saver. Like, I’m not a, what about a rainy day kind of guy, even though I had like a very prominent rainy day when I was made redundant a couple of years ago and was like, oh yeah, this is what people say for. But did I learn my lesson? Well, talk to the mountain of Haribo rappers. Okay, good. That’s a powerful metaphor there and- It isn’t a metaphor, it’s actually real. No, it’s a literal pile of- It’s a literal mountain. I’m not cloning a metaphorical sweet mountain here. And he is literally inviting you to come and talk to them and like, you can film it and everything. Yeah, it’s all there. I’m gonna die on that thing. Like all those bodies that get frozen on top of the Himalayas. Well, okay, good. We’ve successfully weeded out the casual listeners with four minutes of bullshit. So that’s good. I’m quite proud of that. So Matthew, you’ve had a week off this week. I’ve got an inkling that you’ve only been doing one thing with that week off. But how’s it going? It’s going brilliantly. I’ve been playing Zelda all week, obviously, though I have been taking more trips out the house than I expected to, you know, just so I don’t go like mad sitting in the living room. So we’ve been trying to pop out to do like shopping runs for the aforementioned Haribo because, you know, I wanted to go like full teenage, like Matthew mode of just like new game, make sure I’ve got a huge supply of fizzy drinks and sweets so I can just like snack all day. Sounds handsome. Oh, it’s been it’s been it’s been so good. Really captured something. You know, there’s very few games that deserve this this all out treatment. Deliveroo’s for lunch, The Works, though I did leave the house to see Guardians of the Galaxy today, so I had a little break from it. That’s good. Was that did that live up to your low expectations? Better than some of the others, I think, just because it’s self contained. It instantly does away with a lot of the MCU bullshit. It didn’t feel like a chapter in something other than Guardians of the Galaxy, I guess. Though weirdly, when we went to the cinema, the sound system broke during the trailers because it was in the middle of the Oppenheimer trailer and suddenly all that was happening was just the dialogue, no sound effect or music. Weirdly, because Christopher Nolan being Christopher Nolan, you’re watching it thinking, is this intentional? Because it’s just lots of people going like, good God, and it’s going to happen. And you’re like, wow, this is quite an artistic choice. But then in everything else, the sound was fucked and the film started, so I had to go out. And so I missed a key scene where they explained what quest they were on. So I managed to piece the plot together. It’s not like rocket science, although it is. Great. That was, wow, you really landed the plane on that one. So yeah, it was fun. I like the idea that you were just sat there for the Oppenheim trailer thinking, wow, Nolan took the criticism of Tennant and Bane’s dialogue being inaudible so personally. He’s made a film that’s dialogue only with no music. That’s the only takeaway from that. It was like that weird mummy trailer where you could only hear Tom Cruise scream. Oh yeah, yeah, that was incredible. It had that energy. Very strange experience. Yeah, that summed up that film. I want to see the same effect with the Greta Gerwig Barbie film, because I feel like somehow that will end up looking like a horror film if you take all the music out of it, so yeah, that should be good. Okay, good. Sounds like a rich week off. That’s the interesting thing about this episode, right? So, obviously, this is two giant men play Tears of the Kingdom, and I’ve been so stressed out by the prospect of this podcast for one very simple reason. I do not feel like I’m going to get an overall impression of what I think of this game until I’m tens of hours into it, which is a strange thing to say, but is true, because this game is quite unusual in how it’s structured and how the experience kind of pans out. So I’ve been sweating this a little bit, but you have played so much more of this game than me. So you are in a much better position to talk about this authoritatively. Obviously you are the Zelda head on this podcast. So excited to go through this with you and find out if you think it’s superior to Edge 10 out of 10 Skyward Sword, Matthew. That’s a key thing to figure out here. So let’s start then. Brass Tax. How many hours of this game have you played so far in your week off? Because it tells you in the Switch menu, right? It hasn’t kicked in. The hour count only kicks in after a certain amount of time has like passed. As in, I don’t know, currently it says you are playing this game, so it doesn’t actually tell me. I would probably put it somewhere between 30 and 40. So not like, you know, not enough to have seen everything, but enough to have seen most of what it has to offer. I mean, I don’t know, honestly, like, so, you know, I’ll sort of say, and we’re gonna talk about lots of different things in this episode, but like, just if anyone like upfront wants an indicator of where I am, in case they’re like, ah, he’s gonna spoil it. I’ve done one of the four story missions, right, and the rest of it, I’ve basically just been pissing about. Yeah, so, yeah, I’ve played about 10 hours of this, I’ve not done maybe a bit more than that, actually, that might be lowboarding it a bit. I have mostly been pottering around the opening sort of Hyrule area, which is, you know, obviously, this game is, is, is, uses the same overworld as The Legend of Zelda Breath of the World from 2017, but adds loads and loads of new content to that world. But it does start you in well, after after a fashion, it starts in a place that feels kind of familiar. So I’ve been pottering around that area, completing shrines and exploring and uncovering side quests, that sort of thing. And I’m not even close to having an overall handle on what this game is exactly. Yes, Matthew, some some more context then. So, you know, just for listeners sake, we’re not going to spoil anything major in this episode. This is very much designed as like a spoiler free impressions kind of episode. So we’ve got some broader thoughts in section one. Section two will have a few more specifics. At most, we will spoil the very opening hours of this. I don’t think, Matthew, there’s any other kind of like warnings we need to put in there. I think we’ll probably keep it quite top line. What do you reckon? Yeah, I think so. I think that’s that’s the right way of doing it. And obviously it’s a tricky one because you’re kind of free to go in any direction. And in any direction you go, you’re going to start finding stuff and uncovering stuff. And it’s not like it has a structure of like, oh, this is the first thing you’ll find and this is the second thing. So, you know, I’ve probably seen a lot of stuff like, well, I can take case in point like Catherine’s playing it. She also has the week off and is basically doing exactly what I’m doing. And there’s lots of stuff. We’re seeing a lot of different stuff and are trying not to sort of spoil it for each other. So I think just through that process, I, you know, I’m trying not to spoil stuff for Catherine and I’ll basically apply the same sort of thinking here. OK, that makes sense. Did getting your copy first before Catherine create any marital difficulties for you this past week? Did that happen? No, she very graciously let me start playing because it unlocked at midnight on Friday morning. Right. And, you know, I was a little bit like, oh, I wouldn’t I wouldn’t mind booting up just to see, like, the title screen, just to see, you know, what it looks like, whatever. Right. And ended up playing about an hour then. But with her there is what like she wants, you know, she was sat there as well and was looking at it, you know, which for me, I’d be like, no fucking way am I watching someone else play the opening hour of this game. So, yeah, I basically did like a one person live stream to a live audience in our house. Right. Complete with complete running commentary over the whole hour. I didn’t do that. So, yeah, and then I played it. Yeah, I played it most of Friday, but left the house. I took Katherine out for the lunch because I was feeling bad that I was getting to play it and she wasn’t. That’s good. Yeah. Little bit of a lamb lamb. It’s a sort of like rap thing there from Kingsmeat Kitchen, Matthew. We went to that sushi place, Hondo. I like their chicken katsu curry there. Oh, yeah. I’ve not tried that place. And it’s because I’m kind of confused. It always looks like I’m walking into a shop. And then it’s attached to an Asian supermarket. Right, right. And the whole thing has the energy of like, where does the supermarket end and the restaurant begin, which is a little bit chaotic. But it’s like not like the, you know, it’s a little bit no frills inside. But the food’s good. And they do that Japanese lemonade with the you have to smash that little glass ball into the drink. No, I’ve never had that. But, you know, it sounds like something I might have experienced via the FUSA series at some point. But I don’t know. It’s always a bit awkward because they ask Ramune, I think it’s called. And it requires a little bit of physical force to open it. And the waiters always say, do you want me to do this for you? As if to say, like, you weak piece of shit. But I also don’t like making a big physical show of anything in public just in case I do fuck it up. So I’m always like, please go right ahead. Right. So they sort of smash it down. It’s a little bit like, what would I liken it to? It’s a little bit like the chocolate orange tap, but for drinks. Oh dear. It’s sort of like, sometimes I worry you’ve just got too much of a beta mindset, Matthew. I think you’re capable of like making your own lemonade. Do you know what I mean? Like I just, I have that level of belief in you. You know, I’m just going to let that out. I don’t know. But yeah, I hope you’re enjoying this episode on Tears of the Kingdom. Yes. Okay. So let’s start with what is this computer game? So The Legend of Zelda Breath of the Wild, released in 2017 for Wii U and Nintendo Switch. It was largely considered a Switch game though. It was, you know, responsible for shifting an enormous amount of consoles at the time. It was revered as one of the greatest games ever made. They decided to make a direct sequel, which I think was announced in 2019. Long, long wait. The trailer they showed at the time was Link and Zelda going into the caves underneath Hyrule Castle. That is where this game starts. This game uses the basis of Hyrule as its overworld essentially, but there are areas to explore above the map and below the map, floating islands and also underground spaces to explore. So it’s not exactly the same thing. The map they do have, they’re filled with a lot more things. It’s been six years, an enormously anticipated game on this podcast, me and Matthew. I think like maybe I had it a second in my Games of the Generation, you had it first, but certainly it’s a game we adore and have discussed many, many times. It was number one, I believe, in Matthew’s Zelda games list too. So enormously important to us. Matthew, what do you think of it? No surprise to anyone, I think this is a phenomenal video game. I am genuinely blown away by the execution of its big new ideas. How much they squeeze out of the same map, how much of a, like how little of a problem that is. Like my big concern going in was, is this going to feel kind of busted as an experience? Because Discovery and seeing it all afresh is such an integral part of the first game. Surely, surely just reusing the map can’t possibly deliver a similar experience. Maybe I was thinking a little bit of like the DLC, which the DLC for Breath of the Wild, where they kind of stuck some more shrines in the map and some extra riddles on top of the map. But it was fundamentally the same place. And you’re like, is that going to be it? Is that an indication of where their heads at? Partly because they’ve just been so quiet on this game. Like, they’ve not said anything in the first interviews about this game. Literally happened the week of launch. They put up a chain of interviews, sort of like their spiritual successor to Orwateras on the Nintendo site and some selected press had interviews that went live on Friday. And, you know, I was struck by, like, we haven’t heard Onuma talk about this series. That’s Eiji Onuma, the producer of Zelda. You know, in almost six years, like, you know, what the fuck? What have these guys been doing? And, you know, surely they must be doing something spectacular. And, yeah, it’s just discovering what they have been up to is, yeah, been, you know, a crazy treat. And I’m so glad I went in sort of blind on this. I didn’t read any of the reviews. I still haven’t read any of the reviews. That’s how lacking confidence I am that I’ve seen everything this game has to offer, that even after 30, 40 hours, I still feel like there’s stuff that I just want to kind of come across by myself. So kind of a hard one to talk about and summarize because it’s that sense of playing something and thinking, this is going to be a biggie for me, you know, like, this is, I can just feel it in its bones. So you don’t like to call these things too early, but it’s given me exactly the same vibes that I’ve gotten playing some of my favorite games of all times for the first time. You know, it’s, it has that, you know, that just magic quality that I look for in the games that are, you know, quote unquote, unquote, masterpieces. Interesting. So here’s a question I want to ask you. Is that how you felt throughout your time playing it? And I ask that not with any kind of like bad intentions, but just because some of the people I’m talking to, their opinion of it is changing as it goes. And one of the conundrums I sort of face in this podcast is I, I don’t feel I’ve played enough to like offer even really a comprehensive first impression. I know you do, but I do know a few people I was speaking to, their opinion of it has changed as they’ve gone deeper into it. And it’s fluctuated that relationship with the game for a few reasons we’ll get into. So have you always had that stance as you’ve been playing it? Have you always been like, I love what this is doing and I dig it? I had to sort of get down to the surface, I think, because obviously, like the meat of the game is, is the map of Hyrule and what’s going on down there. And I was more interested in what had changed and what they’d done to kind of refresh that map than necessarily like the new stuff. So, you know, we’re already into spoiler territory here, but you know, the story opens in the skies and we’ll talk a bit about that, you know, in a bit more detail. I was liking that stuff. I was enjoying the look of the place and the vibe of the place. And it was quite elegantly teaching me new ideas. And there was lots of things I thought, oh, this is kind of cool. I kind of have a feel for this game. And actually, you know, I think a lot of the stuff it was teaching you is then the stuff that you kind of go wild with down in Hyrule. And, you know, that’s when it really opens up. It’s actually quite a linear bit up in the skies. And I can tell you the precise moment where I thought, if only for this, this is spectacular. And it actually was up in the skies. There are devices in this game. There are like these bird gliders, which are just shaped like birds. And you can put them in ramps and they slide off. And Link stands on top of it as it glides down. You can control it by walking around on it. So it’s a big physics object. Imagine like a little man standing on a paper aeroplane. If you walk towards the front of the plane, its nose dips and it goes down faster. If you go to the back of the plane, its nose rises and it will slow its descent. And just that execution of that physics experience of like the sense of a glide and how you could move that object, that felt like such a tactile, pure, like Nintendo execution of that idea. That was the first thing where I was like, holy shit, that is so nice, such a nice feeling thing. So, you know, that was probably a couple of hours in where I had this first sort of, oh, this is just so cool. And yeah, and then since then it’s kind of been like a run of moments like that and discoveries like that. And there is just a baseline enjoyment of being in that world and just the moment to moment moving about and it’s sort of impeccable vibes and sound design and just the nature of it all is still really lovely to me. But yeah, it’s just been like discovering all the new crazy shit that they’ve made. And this really is new crazy shit, the game. So yeah, it wasn’t like, yeah, I’m not gonna lie. It wasn’t like a like, holy shit, I’m playing a 10 from the first 10 minutes of it or anything. Right. Though I do love the narrative beat at the start. I thought that was really unusual. And that actually like announced a slightly different kind of Zelda game that we were going to be playing to something. There’s something very interesting in this being a direct sequel and how that changes kind of how Nintendo think and deal with the world and characters and story, which aren’t really things we necessarily like associate with Nintendo. So from like a nerdy Nintendo follower perspective, that stuff’s been super engaging. I’m going to say this a lot. It is a super hard one to unpick this because like I’m still in the midst of playing it. Getting my thoughts in order. I’m really glad I didn’t have to review it despite pursuing that review quite aggressively. To have crammed this in even into two weeks, I think people had with it, would have been kind of unacceptable to me. Yeah. I just saw that Edge reviewed, well actually I won’t review what the Edge scores were because I know that they like to keep that secret for every issue, don’t they? But yeah, I saw that there were like two other games in Edge that got a nine this month. I was so stressed out by the thought of trying to play anything else other than this until at least Final Fantasy XVI comes out because this is like a game that it actually is not made for the deranged people like us who play 40 plus games a year. It’s made for people I think who play two to three games a year and this is like a, this will be a massive part of their gaming year and this is, you just can’t approach this conventionally. You can’t think of it as, I’ll get through the critical path in 20 hours because it’s just not that, it’s not that experience. If you do that, you are fighting what it is in order to get there. So here’s the, here was the big takeaway from my first impression with this game was this game, it was the realization and I suspected this anyway from, you know, the build up to this, it cannot club you over the head with the sense of newness that Breath of the World did. In this form, it can’t replicate that exact feeling of, holy shit, look at this amazing world they’ve built and in this art style, look out, you know, how tactile it is, all these amazing things you do. It cannot give you that experience because it is a direct sequel. It does, it’s aesthetically similar. It has tons of new features, but the fundamental first impression of, holy shit, I’m on this plateau, you know, it’s a contained space, but also I can see everything else around me, like a whole world out there waiting to be explored. This when it props you on that floating island, you can see some stuff in the distance. It’s sort of like it just doesn’t give you that same level of like, holy shit, what am I looking at? And that is not necessarily something I would ding it for majorly, but there was, I will admit there was some disappointment I had to get over with that of like, it just didn’t make a first impression where I was like, I was anything but a little bit lukewarm. I thought, okay, this feels more like an extended tutorial than the start of my great adventure. Just more in a more pronounced way, because that opening island, we’ll discuss it more in part two. They’re about introducing a bunch of new mechanics to the game, so there’s a few. There’s basically like a ultra hand, which allows you to sort of weld objects together in this like blue tack like fashion to build different contraptions or create a bridge, that sort of thing. There’s also a very advanced feature that is technically amazing, that is in this game, this Nintendo Switch game, and allows you to build such amazing things, as I’m sure people have seen on social media by now, unless you have wisely been avoiding it at all costs. There’s also Fuse, which allows you to merge a weapon with any other item that you drop on the ground, which is okay as a feature, we can talk a bit about that. There’s some things I like about it, and some ways I think it’s a little bit fiddly. There’s also my favorite feature in this game, which is the rewind feature, which allows you to basically reverse the animation of any object in the game, which allows you to sort of like fall ass backwards into solving so many puzzles in this game by, let’s say you build something using Ultra Hand and you try and prop it up and it falls down. You can use the rewind function to get it to the point where it was propped up and use that to climb up onto a surface. That’s just one of the ways you can use that and that I think is kind of amazing. I saw like temporal pincer movement in my way around this game. And then there’s also a feature called Ascend, is that right Matthew or is it Ascend? And so yeah, that allows you to basically pop up through any sort of surface that’s above you in the game. I think that’s it for what they give you at the start. Is that right Matthew? I think that’s right. Yeah, that sounds about right. And then there’s more they layer in, there’s more of the old legacy Zelda stuff they layer back in too, and like you say, it teaches you as well about these Zonai artifacts, which give you, you know, ways to sort of craft cool things in the game, but also, like you mentioned, they give you that neat little glider as well. So all of that is basically what the first few hours are about. It’s about overloading your brains of Neo style with look at all this stuff we’ve built and teaching you how to use it. And once you do get down onto Hyrule, you have a good idea of how those fundamentals work and then you’re unleashed in the world to go and experiment with those things. And so with all that in mind, Matthew, do you think my point about newness is fair? Would it be too much to ask from this game to still wow you in that very specific way that Breath of the Wild did when I first played it 2017? Am I asking too much there to expect that in any form? It’s very hard to see what they could have possibly have done that would have had that impact, you know, just because visually it looks so similar and, you know, like you say, is that landscape again, you know, short of them literally making a new world and short of them making a whole new Zelda basically. It is hard for them to deliver that same moment. But what I would say is that they see so much stuff in that opening stretch that reveals itself to be just pure genius, like once you get to grips with it. And now I can’t really imagine it without that stuff. It’s something Chris Schilling said to me of like a big kind of test he did with it of like after playing it and going back to Breath of the Wild and finding it like greatly inferior without those tools and that’s interesting to me. There is definitely stuff in this which I absolutely love but it speaks to me as a major Zelda nerd. I really do like that little opening narrative bit, you know, like that got me really really excited for it and you know it was already doing something the first game sort of didn’t really do. You know the strange thing about Breath of the Wild is that its meat of its story takes place a hundred years in the past and is revealed through kind of flashback cutscenes and this is just a lot more present you know what’s what’s happening and you know what’s happening is happening to Link in the here and now and also it’s a fair bit more complicated. It’s a little bit more like traditional Zelda. One of the kind of predictions or things I had hoped for was that they took the Hyrule from Breath of the World and then kind of embedded a more traditional Zelda quest in it, with dungeons and the lore and the kind of the collectible doodads. The things I associate more with like Ocarina, Twilight Princess, Wind Waker, kind of that kind of era 3D Zelda and like to a degree they have done that. It’s just it’s still surrounded by as much if not more of the kind of open-ended stuff. You know I think there is a version of this game which if you mainline it would probably feel and look a lot more like a traditional 3D Zelda than Breath of the Wild did. I just I don’t know I wouldn’t recommend playing it that way. So that was a really sprawling answer that didn’t really answer your question. No it’s fine you know you were excited by the present symbol Zelda stuff. I think that just I don’t want that to seem as like too damning because it’s not really. I think it is something that is just unavoidable in some ways. It just can’t it cannot hit you with that same feeling. You know the Zelda team have been working on the Zelda games as a collective group for like a long time. You know Fujibayashi who directed Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom also directed Skyward Sword and Hitty himself is like a kind of confessed fan of Zelda puzzles and and like more linear Zelda design. He is also the person who chooses to open up to this more systemic Zelda. But he still has that interest and I think he has and his team have correctly identified that you can embed a more focused, more scripted stuff in that map without it running counter to the promise of freedom. You know, I think it’s there, you know, I think there’s there’s definite moments where they really kind of like focus your gaze on something in particular, much more than Breath of the Wild. But even in that moment how you tackle it and the link you bring into that moment can fluctuate wildly based on how you choose to play the game, you know, there’s there’s absolutely no single correct solution to much of what I’ve played, which would be an indicator of like more traditional Zelda thinking. The way the the story beats, which again like the first game, there are like four things you can do at this point in the game, I don’t know if there are more beyond that, who knows. You know, you’re kind of working towards a quote unquote dungeon, but the run-up to it is a bit more substantial and a bit more the kind of the run-up to some of the dungeons in the earlier games as well. And this is something Breath of the Wild did, but just not in a substantial way. There’s a lot of stuff in this game, which I actually think they would have done in Breath of the World if maybe they’d had a bit more time. I don’t think a lot of this stuff is corrective. I think it’s them delivering on a hint of something. You know, I keep coming back to like the little quest lines you did before you went into the Divine Beasts in Breath of the Wild. You’d meet a character, they’d give you a task, you’d go off and do it. But some of them were a little bit more scripted. That one where you have to guide like the Goron up the mountain and kind of take shots at the Divine Beast. He has to follow this path, so you’re kind of like stuck to this linear area. You have to protect him. There are these spy drone things above, and you have to work out how to bring down each spy drone. And that is actually like, that’s not far off a Skyward Sword Overworld puzzle. So I think that there was that stuff in here and here they’ve just like blown it out in a big way. So maybe as a Skyward Sword Laker, I can kind of see a bit more connective tissue to those earlier games and sort of see that it is a kind of continued fascination for this particular director. I don’t see it as like an apology and I don’t see it as a kind of corrective. It’s just sort of what I think they always had in mind is my read on it anyway. Okay, interesting. Yeah, just because that first game was so open-ended its structure, not just in how you approach the game. In some ways, actually, once you once you got to your destination, the solution was fairly straightforward. So, yeah, I mean, you can still do the, you know, it’s still like, hey, you’ve arrived. There are four regions and there are four bad things going on in each region. You can do them in any order. I mean, structurally, it doesn’t seem that different. There’s maybe a bit more dressing, like along the way. I mean, definitely, if you imagine it’s spoking out in four directions, those spokes have a few more kind of required destinations along them, which probably is a bit different. Yeah, and more story as well tied to it. It feels like story is plays a slightly bigger part here than it did in the first game to me, like the number of cutscenes and things like that. But I think that’s the interesting thing of like this, you know, there hasn’t been a direct Zelda sequel for a long time, not since like Majora’s Mask, I guess Link Between Worlds if you want to kind of… I don’t know, I see that as a bit of an oddity on the side. But the idea of that, you’re going back to this world and you have to continue a story thread, which is actually something they kind of reject a lot, you know, the classic Nintendo line is that, you know, there are kind of mechanics first, and then they just graft a story onto it to make it work. Like Miyamoto says, you never come at it from the perspective of, what’s the story you want to tell and then you make the game around it? That just isn’t how they do it. But actually in a direct sequel where you have a history to account for and characters lives that you want to continue and the kind of past you want to kind of reckon with, you actually do have to ask those questions. And the thing that has struck me in a good way, I really love it about this game, is how much sort of thought has gone into that story content. I mean, it’s almost hilarious how many minor characters have something that relates to the first game. All these kind of stable masters from the stables, who are like, remember me? And you’re like, no, I thought you were a generic man, who was at every stable in Breath of the Wild. I didn’t realize you were like individual characters with individual lives, you know. And it’s kind of like, I got laid off from this one stable, and you’re like, I didn’t even know you worked there. I’m so sorry, I wasn’t paying that much attention to you, but Nintendo was. And if you were super into Breath of the Wild, and you were super nerdy about it, you know, it’s kind of wild. How much of that stuff they have done, like traditional sort of sequel craft, it’s kind of, that feels like a big step for them. But like maybe by conventional, you know, sequel thinking, that isn’t as controversial a move. In a Nintendo game, you’re like, it’s kind of crazy that this thing kind of hinges so much on the first game. Yeah, it is interesting, because I think that something people pondered, a very broad observation was, will this be the Majora’s Mask of, you know, of Breath of the Wild, relatively speaking, i.e. some asset flipping, some remixing, but otherwise an original game built from those mechanics. I almost think the canvas is too wide here to make that comparison based on what I’ve played so far, but I was curious what you make of that as a theory to apply to this. People would like it, because Majora’s Mask is like the weirdo one to like, right? It’s the one that cool people like. No, this is, I mean, this is like much more normal. There is some surprisingly like dark and creepy stuff in it. There’s always been a slightly weird horror element. You know, we’ve talked about this before, that there is someone on the Zelda team is like a weirdo and occasionally manages to smuggle through something which is like genuinely quite disturbing, like the re-deads in Ocarina or the kind of like that, the sort of sealed undead knights in Twilight Princess. There’s always something that sits through the cracks and here I’d argue one of the substantial kind of geographical twists to this map is like very sinister in its nature. They’ve, I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say the guardians from the first game aren’t a thing in here, those big kind of tentacle bots, but there is a kind of equivalent of them that can happen. I don’t know if it’s by random or if it’s certain locations, but there’s a certain thing that can kind of kick off and the game gets quite scary, quite fast when it does. And it’s only happened like three times in 30 hours, but it’s absolutely, it’s just hugely stressed me out every time it’s happened. There is, there’s a strand of that. There’s a big side quest involving a very incredibly cursed statue that honestly feels like it wouldn’t be out of place in like an Elden Ring or something. I just think like there’s so much stuff in here. Like some of it is bound to kind of scratch that Majora’s Mask itch. I think there’s so much stuff in here. It’s bound to kind of scratch whatever Zelda itch you have. Okay, interesting. So I suppose Matthew, I was curious to know what you make of these various new game mechanics. And I asked this because I feel like I only have a partial framework of how important they are in the game. So they are positioned very much as tools that are essential to your adventure. However, traditionally you and I are not massive on crafting systems and the ultra hand stuff is a big part of what social media has latched on to with this game for obvious reasons. Has this changed your mind on crafting? And how do you feel about the new mechanics generally? Yeah, I absolutely love them. It hasn’t changed my mind of crafting. All it’s done is reinforce them. If someone makes a crafting system that I like enough, I’ll like it. I’m not anti-crafting. I’m not that much of a sort of zeal about things, I would hope. But yeah, I think it’s the perfect balance of freedom to experiment, but also achievable. Maybe a little bit of bedding in time with the controls. I’m willing to accept that. That is something in an early stretch of this game. Like there is a little bit of kind of like recalibrating required to kind of get your head around the ultra hand. It probably helps that I went straight into this from a Breath of the Wild playthrough. So I was kind of on board with all the other control quirks that are just naturally part of Breath of the Wild. But yeah, so two big things with the crafting in this game. I think one, it feels like a really natural evolution of what they did in Breath of the Wild, which was asked the question, what if Hyrule had systems? You know, once Hyrule had physics, survival systems, whether, you know, that stuff is kind of like where the spark of life in that game came from. And this is kind of like, well, take all that, but what also would happen if like engineering to came to Hyrule? You know, what happens if like, this is like Hyrule meets automation and it’s the role kind of like machines can play in an explorer’s lifestyle and how they change that lifestyle that I think is just, I think it’s absolutely brilliant. I think this is probably the big reason I don’t feel like the map is being reused is I think the game that plays out in that map is so changed fundamentally by this new system that you just don’t see the topography in the same way. You begin to see it on a far more macro scale because it’s no longer about the challenge of climbing this individual cliff face or this individual hill. You know, it’s about, well, if I can glide, you know, if I can build a plane or something off the top of this hill, you know, this can get me across this whole region. You’re beginning to, you can move a lot faster with these machines and that completely changes like how the map behaves kind of underneath you, which I think is super cool. And, you know, a big reason why I haven’t felt much deja vu at all, actually. I think crucially, the thing I really love about it is it kind of adheres to a sense of like cartoon physics. There’s this idea of, and I’m stealing this from an interview Chris Schilling did with Fujibashi for Breath of the Wild, where he talked about the physics in that game of like, if you think it will work, it will kind of work, is the kind of vibe we’re going for. You know, we’re not trying to kind of like, accurately recreate how the world functions. It’s a sense of like, we’ll give it like a bit of a nudge to make it happen if you think it should. And this is 100% what they’re doing with this building idea. You know, I think, you know, you’re not getting too bogged down in like balance or aerodynamics or weight. You know, it’s quite easy to stick fans on stuff and then it will go forwards kind of no matter what it is. And from there, you have the basics of any kind of vehicle and you know, how you decide to kind of like add extra flourishes to that. You know, you’re kind of off to the races. I’ve seen some people be like, yes, Banjo Nuts and Bolts is vindicated by this game, but this is like way simpler in terms of the number of parts you have. It’s much, much quicker to kind of build something like the kind of experimentation that’s at the heart of this system. You know, it’s kind of like you can bang something together in like a minute, and then if it doesn’t work, you’re like, well, fuck it, it was a minute. But Banjo was like a very, very fiddly, unpleasant system of like, you know, 10, 20, 30 minutes to build basically a giant piece of shit that would never, ever work. And like that was just pure death. I haven’t got any of that here. And I think that is like the big hurdle they’ve got over. It’s kind of like kind of stick two things together and something interesting will always happen. And yes, at the other end of the scale, you have people building like bonkers robots that kind of transform somehow. I have no idea how these videos on Twitter are working. But like in the here and now, like I’ve yet to, I’ve yet to like put any amount of time into anything where it hasn’t kind of delivered on that kind of promise, which for me is kind of the, that’s kind of what it needed to do to kind of win me over. I don’t know, how are you getting on with that side of things? So I think the way that things click together is very elegant in terms of if you can think of it, it’ll work sort of thing. Where I don’t think it works is the controls, like you say. I think for Nintendo, who are generally very good at clean control schemes and understandable control schemes, this is like something they’re incredibly good at. There are so many times, and I know this is not just limited to me, where I go to accidentally throw my weapon when I want to activate an ability, and I think I’m really struggling to click out of that even after all these hours. I think it’s because there’s so much mapped onto this control scheme that was already quite busy with things you need to do with it, and now it has a lot more going on as well. Then sometimes I have to remember things like, I can’t just select an item from the menu to fuse with my weapon. I have to drop it on the floor first and then fuse it. That’s fiddly. That’s like, I think, of all the various things, I think that’s the biggest misstep for that system. It encourages you to not engage with it instantly, because you can do it with arrows. You can instantly fuse anything. And I use that loads. I’m much more of an arrow guy in this game than I was before. Yeah, that’s interesting. Like you say, the arrow stuff, that’s instantaneous. And some of those, I think the arrow stuff actually is much more interesting as a fusion dynamic than what I’ve played of the melee weapons so far, which mostly seems to be a way to extend the weapons from breaking and give you a little boost along the way. Whereas I feel like at least so far from what I’ve played, like the, I guess the status effects do apply to the weapons too, but when you just have like the what’s it high on the end of an arrow and it becomes a homing arrow, that rules, for example, or, you know, an arrow becomes a flaming arrow. Fantastic. And there are so many variants therein. The weapons at Fusion does have that as well, but because of the whole dropping on the ground thing and the lack of an instantaneous pop it together, it’s done feeling, that is slightly fiddly. So I’m not totally sold on that. That feels like something they could just patch out. I wonder if they will actually, based on their assumption to it. But either way, actually, I will say in general, the accessing your inventory feels a lot more straightforward in this. And like also the fact that you can drop items when you pick up other items, great touch as well. So lots of nice quality life changes, but Ultra Hand. So I respect what it does, but I think it actually is quite complicated and fiddly for what it is. Now, it could be a lot fiddlier. It’s certainly like, like you say, like there is this kind of like kids stick together, things together mentality to it. It’s not overtly complicated, but certainly in the early hours, I feel like the return on investment for time is quite low. You build like a NAFCAR that goes forward not very quickly and then runs out of battery straight away. And I’m like, well, I’ll just go find a horse then. And that’s how I feel about it a little bit. And some of the puzzles where they ask you to stick this stuff together, inevitably, I just end up doing like one log after another to try and build a big bridge. And there’s a lot of that going on, as opposed to these eureka moments of, wow, I’ll build something amazing and spectacular. And so I’m not won over by that system yet. It’s probably my biggest bugbear with the game so far. So I think it is harder to use than maybe I was expecting. And I don’t quite buy into the idea that Nintendo has solved this in a way that other developers haven’t. That’s not quite where I’m at with it. But there’s still a lot to appreciate about it. The fact that you can build incredibly complex things and the Switch doesn’t fall down is very impressive. And I’ve seen evidence of how the systems escalate and you suddenly have tanks and then, let you say, aircraft and stuff like that. So maybe it’s one of those things where the really interesting crafting stuff gets added much deeper into the game. But certainly in the early stages, I’m like, do I want to build a slightly naff automatic chariot? Not really. I’ll just go find a horse. And that’s kind of where I’m at on that one, basically. Yeah, I mean, I don’t know. Yeah, it’s a thing to be like. I definitely struggle with the fiddliness of particularly rotating shapes to begin with. But now, just focusing on it for the last few days, it really has kind of slipped into second nature. I think there’s a lot of stuff which helps you as time goes on. I think a lot of the shrines are basically designed to like teach you a kind of idea for later inspiration. It’s kind of like, hey, here’s this spring. And it kind of behaves in this way and this way if you think about it. And then the next time you find one, you’re like, oh, yes, I guess I could use it this way or that way. And the shrines did that in the first game as well, you know, like if you didn’t sort of see something happen in the outside world for yourself, the shrines were a way of going, well, take a good look at this and really have a think about what’s going on here. And almost by becoming a puzzle, when you overcame it, it was such a good learning experience because you’re like, oh, right, I can place metal objects on the floor and electricity will pass between them. Now I can apply that in all these ways out in the world. And it does the same way here. If anything, I think the shrines are a little bit more overtly tutorially in this one than they were before. But the knowledge you come out with, you know, you then put to such good use. There is a there is a mechanic that you will find that speeds up building a little bit. They get basically blueprints, right? Yeah, well, you know, it’s a thing in itself. And actually, the storyline around that is like brilliantly done. And it really links to the first game in a really fun way. It’s like a big, a huge pleasant, a real surprise that moment. I wouldn’t I wouldn’t want spoiled for me. So I won’t go any further on that. But like, that instantly kind of gets things moving a lot faster. I think as you uncover more of the map, you begin to get more of those like there is these like capsule machine dispensers that give you kind of the juicy parts that you really want, you know, the kind of the wheels and the wings and the fans. And they’re actually pretty generous to the point where you stop thinking like, oh, I have to I really have to nail this this first time because I won’t have any building parts if this fucks up and actually I think like the biggest leap this game is made for crafting with me is to kind of make me quite kind of like carefree in how I approach it, which I think is kind of the mindset and that’s what the game is having to do. It’s not just teaching you the system. It’s trying to teach a mindset of like how you think about that world and how you think about building and contraptions. And, you know, just making you feel like you can fuck stuff up, I think is probably like one of the biggest lessons they have to teach. And, you know, this is a game people are going to be playing for hundreds of hours. So maybe like it’s acceptable to see that as a learning curve in itself, you know, to kind of maybe go, well, to start off with, I’m going to be building like pieces of shit, or maybe I won’t engage with it. But the first time you do build something really cool that really, you know, bails you out, like I think you’re instantly on a road to kind of engaging with a system, which is, I think, like the best of its kind. You know, I really, like, I can’t really imagine this world without that construction. And, you know, as you get out of that opening area, there’s so much stuff that requires you to engage with it, you know. You know, it’s a little bit kind of, you’re right about the horse thing, you know, when there’s kind of like, you meet like a little Korok and he’s like, get me to my friend. And then you’re like, well, your friend’s like 200 meters away and I could literally just carry you by ultra hand or like by horse or whatever. But later on, like when they are kind of, you know, split on different mountain tops or across a huge lake and it does become quicker to just go, fuck it. I’m just going to build some mad little thing and like boost us over there. And that sense of achievement, I think is like that’s kind of where I am now with it. I’m just, you know, I’m looking for I’m always looking for those opportunities to use those things and play with more parts. So, you know, I’m a, yeah, I’m a big, big convert to this this system. I think it’s kind of perfectly, perfectly pitched between achievability and complexity. Yeah. And I think that that’s why I’m very reticent to say this is my take on it, like, comprehensively, because it’s hard to get your arms around the entirety of this game. But certainly so far, that’s like the one thing I’m like, I’m just out on so far. I’m just like, I don’t get this. And maybe that will change, like you say, as I unlock the systems that make it simpler, that arguably it should maybe have it, it’s arguably, they should let you save blueprints from the start of the game. That’s, I don’t know, that might have made it a bit simple, because if you build something you’re happy with it, you can just save it, it’s done, as opposed to starting anew every single time, which is arguably not a great new user experience. But that’s, that’s the one thing where I’m like, well, okay, you know, there’s, I know there are more complex parts, so there’s a long way to go with it. Yeah, all I can say is that, like, I hate user generated games. I hate games where I have to make stuff, like, I just, I won’t play them. And it’s like my favourite bit of this. So you know, on my basic, like, logic brain, I’m like, whatever they’ve done for me is like… They put it in a Zelda game. That’s what they did. They put it in a Zelda game. Yeah, yeah, yeah, maybe, maybe that is true. But like, what you use it for, it just has a, you know, I’m just, I’m interested in, in what it’s used for. And it feels like to me, the things you build, they’re very, like, physical, they’re very playful, you know, I think it’s sort of governed by this, like, almost like, there’s like magic in them, not, you know, like, airy fairy way. I mean, like, you know, these aren’t technical machines, you know, there’s like a lump of rock with four wheels. If you attach a steering wheel to it, it knows that, oh, this steering wheel controls the wheels that are attached to this lump of rock. And that logic I can really grasp. I honestly, I think once it adds the steering wheel device, whatever that is, all of a sudden, everything that you build becomes like a lot more kind of controllable and pleasurable because of that. The wrong thing, I keep kind of, you know, I keep hearing like, banjo and nuts and bolts, you have to put like engines in, things like that. But that’s where this doesn’t like make that mistake. It’s like no one fucking cares about how this thing actually works, just that it kind of works. Yeah, that for me is a big leap. But I don’t actually think you do have to engage with it. I mean, it would be mad, like, and sad not to, but like, it’s kind of, I don’t think anything in this game is like, can’t be achieved without it, you know? Yeah. Like, it’s still, like, if you ignore it, it’s just, it is just Breath of the Wild 2. And, interestingly, a lot of the stuff they’ve added in to basically boost the Fuse system, so there’s a lot more objects with, like, interesting behaviours that even if you didn’t engage with the Fuse system, they will, like, end up making the combat sandbox a lot more interesting. You know, there are, like, stealth items or items that kind of change the mental state of enemies, and they’re just like, that’s just like good old-fashioned immersive sim kind of like toys, you know? Regardless of whether they’re attached to an arrow or a shield or a, you know, a fucking rake. Well, that was going to be my sort of grand question to you, really, which was, what do you think the overall philosophy is behind Tears of the Kingdom? Because is it about loading us up with new mechanics and ways to experiment? Since the devs said this sequel merged from cut DLC ideas, that’s partly how Tears of the Kingdom came to be. Obviously, you know, DLCs don’t get worked on for six years, so it’s a much broader proposition than that. Or is it, does it go wider than that? Is this the everything Zelda game and the new mechanics just happen to be one part of a much larger experience among a myriad of other things? Where do you think it lands on that scale? It to me feels like a team that, because they didn’t have to build a world map, got straight to, you know, have basically been able to spend six years making what’s in that world. And some of those are substantial game changing systems, which they went in with mind to like, this is the, you know, they make no bones about it. The idea behind this game is crafting stuff and fusing stuff like that. Those are the two mechanics that like got this project, the green light, according to Fujiwashi in those interviews. You know, he comes up with that and goes, this is what we’re doing. But at the same time, like I said, it’s this huge story push. It’s a much more story rich. I’d say this is a story rich as a Ocarina or Twilight Princess. And if that’s your jam, and you know, lots of people it is, I think that traditional Zelda adventure is a lot more present in this game than it was Breath of the Wild. What they deliver there is that level of like character and warmth and like weirder sides that you would maybe expect from an older Zelda, except of a density that can fill this open world. There’s so much stuff in here. I mean, I can’t even begin to tell you. There are side quests you start in this game where they have like a whole other mechanic attached to them and it becomes this whole other thing. And some of that’s like trad open world thinking. Like there’s a little bit more, you know, I want someone to visit every well in the world and you have 50 or whatever wells to tick off, which feels a little bit more like Ubisoft map filler. But, you know, there’s a lot of people who like want X of this thing, which are going to be spread over the world and you have to go and find them. But there are also like, yeah, I don’t want to spoil them, but there’s, I mean, you know, if people remember Tarry Town from the first game, which is like this town that you built up, going there and seeing how that’s developed story wise, absolute delight. But there’s a whole kind of side thing going on there, which pulls you into this like, you know, almost Animal Crossing type deal. It’s like really substantial and impressive. And it just feels like every department on this game had so much time just to make stuff and just keep filling it and keep filling it and keep filling it. And, you know, Breath of the Wild didn’t really have that. Like one of the things about Breath of the Wild is it feels like they made this amazing map, they made these amazing systems. And it’s not like there are areas of it that are kind of empty. You know, there are whole regions of that where nothing substantial happens apart from like there are five shrines. In this game, like everything is dense, but without feeling too artificial, without feeling like Ubisoft map markers, like it just feels like they’ve very organically gone over everything going what can we put here? What can we change here? And like we haven’t really gotten into like, you know, another reason the map does feel kind of refreshed is that, you know, all of the regions are like geographically changed some substantially like they’ve entire kind of world state changes completely change your relationship with them, which is really interesting. You know, at the very least, because of this new sky kingdom, everything’s been rained down by like lumps of things so that you’ll find weird chunks of like landscape that have fallen down everywhere, which, you know, change again, like the moment to moment of the map. So I think that everything Zelda is right, but it’s kind of every part of that team just just being able to fill this world and maybe that’s the maybe that’s what’s exciting about it being a direct sequel is it kind of freed up the kind of heavy lift of like, what’s the what’s the big new thing to kind of like, well, we can do 100 medium things. And in doing that, that becomes the big thing, you know? Hmm. Yeah, it’s interesting, because I think like when I was sharing with you that I was slightly lukewarm on it, you were like, well, I was suddenly having a better like a, you know, I was finding my feet with it when I went off the beaten track and maybe not getting so hung up on the systems or, you know, understanding those or focusing on those. And I found that kind of interesting. So yeah, the everything’s all the game. Yeah. Yeah. My thoughts are like changing every day based on how I play it. Like I’ve only played this game at the time of recording for four days. So like, and every day, like, you know, sometimes I do a lot of story stuff, I’m like, wow, this is like, you know, Ocarina, but like in a proper open world. And then there are days where I’m like, oh, this is just a supercharged breath of the world. Like I’m climbing up hills, I’m listening to like the cool animal sounds, I’m collecting shit. There’s days where, you know, I’ve been doing a lot of like exploring kind of above and below and kind of trying to get my head around those areas. And we’ll talk about those in the second half, I think. And the tone of what happens there is completely different. It’s very unusual to be bowled over by something where you can’t put your finger on one thing and go, this is the thing that like makes it, you know, it’s there is something unsatisfying in saying like, there are 1000 good decisions here and that’s what I’m reacting to. But that is kind of how I’m reacting to it. I don’t really know how I would review this game for that reason. I don’t have the, this is what this game is currently about. I just know that like, I’m having such a good time with it that, you know, I don’t really know what it would have to do to like really piss me off. I read two reviews of it and I definitely felt a sense of I’m struggling to bottle up exactly what this is under one definitive take. And I really sympathize playing this because it is different to playing Breath of the World in the sense that that plateau, I knew very early on because it was such an accurate microcosm of what the rest of the game was. And you know, and so it would be as time went on in terms of like, it teaches you all the mechanics that you need to go out in the world and enjoy the world and understand how temperature affects things, how your powers work, that sort of stuff, that it sets expectations early. This game can’t quite do that in the same way. It’s like, it’s much more challenging because they do have new mechanics, they do have new parts of the world to explore. They have so much for you to layer on top of what you already know about Breath of the World that it’s, yeah, I do wonder if there’s something, the intro to this game is the way it is because there isn’t necessarily a better way of doing it, i.e. they could string out those powers for a lot longer, wait for you to get them over a longer period of time, or they can take more of that, I guess like more of a player trusting the player approach where you just give it to the player, drop them in the world and say, go enjoy it. At the same time, like I say, the fact that you have quest markers, at least where I’m at in the game, very obvious quest markers, the way you’re meant to go and what you’re meant to do next, is that there is a sense of structure there so you don’t feel like you’re just necessarily lost from the off and you’re not necessarily overwhelmed. It’s just like night and day as an intro experience to Breath of the World and I think that’s what I’m kind of reckoning with. And so when I read the reviews, I’m like, okay, these are people who have gone through many different sort of like peaks with this game and bottling it up seems like a Herculean task in a way it just wasn’t for Breath of the World because I think you could play 20 hours of Breath of the World and have the measure of it even if you don’t see everything. Oh yeah, I mean, you’re right, the plateau in Breath of the World is that game. Like it’s fundamentally everything you’re going to kind of need to do is there. Not true here. Yeah, which is really interesting as sequels go because there aren’t too many games I play these days where I do struggle to get my arms around what it is, you know what I mean? And what I think of it and this is why I’m hesitant to slap any massive take on it beyond my criticism of what I feel about the crafting system so far is because I think in 50 hours time I’m going to feel completely differently about it and I’m totally willing to own up to that. And I do think there’s probably a second pod for us in doing like a spoilery deep dive, you know? Yeah, yeah, for sure. Yeah, I just, the stuff that resonates with me, you know, there’s so much like particular stuff, there’s so much sort of Zelda minutiae in this that, that just, I really dig, you know, there’s, at the same time, there’s like admiration for like puzzle mechanics or, or, you know, some of the new powers he has where I’m like, you know, anywhere else, you know, someone would be lucky to come up with one of these ideas, like ever in their career. And there are like, you know, in the tutorial there, it’s like, here, have this game changing power, have this game changing power, have this game changing power, and, you know, you almost need a game this big, a world this big to kind of give you space to like actually let those things bed in. It’s a big gamble that they will, like it’s definitely, you know, makes you kind of like admire their dedication to sort of how un-Nintendo it is to let people kind of completely off the leash and maybe completely miss the point of something, you know, like I’ve definitely been into a couple of shrines that have kind of recontextualized the power for me where I’m like, oh, I get it. You know, I know what that power is about now. I know how I can use it and, you know, it’s potential to sort of like, you know, blossoms in front of me. Yeah. Weird, confusing, excellent game. 10 out of 10. Yeah, like I don’t know. Currently it’s a 10. Like if you put a gun to my head, I’d say, yeah, it’s an easy 10. I’m not even going to vaguely go there at this stage. But yeah. Yeah. It is a tricky one. It’s made, you know, because I like to like, hate read game forums without ever contributing to them. And it is actually quite infuriating seeing people like live update their experience, like every hour or so, because I think every hour of this game can be completely different. And you could think this was 20 different games in one based on the thing that you chose to do. And seeing people kind of like pinball between them and sort of feel a little sort of sense of frustration. Yeah. It’s, it’s yeah. Or indeed the person you make a podcast with. Yeah. No, no. It’s, it’s it definitely isn’t neat. You know, on that, I agree. You know, like there’s, there’s a certain lack of elegance to it, which you might expect like a Nintendo 10 to have. Yeah. And it’s whether like you’ll spend enough time in this world to kind of master its quirks or maybe Stockholm Syndrome will set in. But there is, there is definitely something in that. Like I’m not, I’m not, I’m not going to say it’s like perfect. No. And actually, I think there’s a certain amount of like acclimatizing needs to be done to the fact that Nintendo’s kind of made a PC game that’s on the Switch. Right. I don’t think that’s, that is something I feel pretty confident about saying just in the way that people are experiencing and talking about it. I think this probably alongside Splatoon shows a new, like a, you really sense like a new generation that is responding to like games outside of Nintendo, like there’s stuff in here which feels so much like not copying other games, but like an idea that was in another game. And you just know these things are in the conversation and, you know, Splatoon is them thinking about what does a Nintendo online shooter look like, you know, and there just has to, there has to be kind of like some interest in the form. They haven’t gone in blind without ever having played an online shooter before. And this one too, there’s just, yeah, there’s things in it, like the elements which do feel more like a, like a movie, Soft Open World, say, where you’re like, this, it definitely feels a bit more trad, you know, and it didn’t have to be, because like no one complained about that with Breath of the Wild at all, and went, oh man, this is, this feels a bit much like, a bit like work, it’s, it’s more like, there’s so much stuff in it, that they’ve kind of, they just want to kind of give framing to and give a name to like everything you can do in this game, which they didn’t really do in Breath of the Wild, like there’s a lot of stuff in Breath of the Wild, you just do it for the sake of doing it, and like that’s part of the magic, where here they’re more likely to go, yes, you can just encounter these giant bosses out in the wild, but like, there may also be a quest line where a group of We’ll go, do you want to come and deck a big monster with us? And you’ll go with those knights, and you’ll fight that monster with those knights, and it will feel a bit more like scripted content. But, you know, it’s things like that. There’s a sense of, like, how do we package up something so sprawling? And some of their answers, by necessity, end up looking like, you know, traditional, like, Western open world game design. Mm, well, that’s really interesting. God, there’s so much fucking game in this thing, isn’t there? I saw, like, I was looking at how long to beat, and I was like, I was side-eyeing the hours on there so much, because I was like, have you played this enough to really say definitively that this is how long it takes to, like, main plus extra this game? I’m not totally convinced of what I’ve played, but yeah. I mean, the map is literally, like, two and a half times bigger than Breath of the Wild. Like, it’s fucking huge. Yeah. You know? Yeah, kind of preposterous on that level. Okay, Matthew, should we take a break there and come back and talk about basically some more about this game, but maybe some more specific detail? Yeah, let’s do it. I don’t really know how to articulate what I think about it either. Oh, reviewing this would have been a fucking nightmare. I’m just glad you didn’t, because you always have review ranks anyway, and then this one has just been off the chain. All right then. Welcome back to the podcast. So, time for some more Tears of the Kingdom chats. We’ll try and get into some more specifics in this part of the podcast. So, Matthew, I’m really curious what you make of the addition of floating islands to this game. Because I do think they add something visually spectacular that wasn’t in Breath of the Wild. Even if I wasn’t necessarily like, oh, this feels new and world and different. I, you know, certainly what it does in terms of your perception of the scale of what you’re exploring, and the fact that there is a seamless transition between those islands in the sky and what is on the ground is incredibly impressive and does feel like something I actually haven’t seen before in a video game in terms of that. Well, I suppose unless you count something like Just Cause, for example, but it’s certainly surprising to see it in something like Zelda. So, or not surprising, because I know this is coming for a long time, but at least, you know, I have not seen this in a Nintendo game before. It feels like unquestionably new in that respect. What do you make of the whole floating island idea in this game? Yeah, I love it for all the reasons you’ve outlined there. It’s not as substantial as I thought it was gonna be, given the amount of focus on it. I guess there was a sense of like, well, we wanna show something that is like the most visually new, because maybe people will feel a little nonplussed if it’s just like, here’s a load of kind of hills. There are screenshots, there are many screenshots you could take of this game where you’re like, Breath of the Wild or Tears of the Kingdom, you won’t be able to tell. But putting you up in the clouds, you’re instantly like, okay, we haven’t seen this before. But I haven’t spent a huge amount of time up there outside of the tutorial, because there’s not as much stuff up there as you’d necessarily think. When you fill in the map in this game, it has a kind of tower mechanic, like the first game. It also fills in the sky map. And sometimes there’s one blip for the whole region and you’re like, oh, I guess there’s not a lot going on up there. But what is up there is certainly very mysterious and quite hard to get to. It’s not a case of like, well, if you just put in lots of time, you can ride between any locations like you can on the ground. Like fundamentally, what holds you back is points of entry. Like actually getting back up there, short of like teleporting to the shrines on the first island is not hugely obvious how you’re meant to get back up there. And once you’re up there, you are limited by how much you can glide using your paraglider from the first game or your competency at building contraptions that will carry you between the islands. And at the moment I’m at a point, I feel like that’s sort of like, there’s some gating going on there. Like I’ve not been able to get to a lot of it. I’ve just not really been able to work out. Now I’ve amassed parts that actually I probably could open up a lot of it. But what I do like is that sense of, well, I can’t get there, but because I can’t get there, I desperately want to get there and see what’s on that thing. And it may just be like a chest, which would be a bummer, but there’s some really weird stuff up there as well, which is cool. I really love the new, sort of the aesthetic of the Zonai civilization. It’s very cool. It’s all a bit like sort of Zen garden, lots of raked sand and things. Were they in the first game, the Zonai? Oh, I don’t really remember there being it. Because it’s all like a new ancient civilization they’ve added to this one, right? That’s kind of what the deal is. So they fought an ancient war beforehand, right? That’s kind of what’s going on. Yeah, I mean, I’m gonna put my hand up and say, there’s a lot about the story in this game, even after all this time, I don’t really understand the main thrust of it. Something happens at the start, which kind of splits Link and Zelda up, but the nature of what’s going on with Zelda is quite confusing. Definitely. It’s genuinely quite hard to work out what the vibe is. So, hmm. But yeah, up there in the clouds, there’s some stuff that… There’s just lots of stuff you just don’t know really how it works and you go there and you get your ass kicked. And there’s some excitement in that because there’s not a lot on the surface, which if you played Loads of Breath of the Wild, you wouldn’t have an inkling of like, well, I can kind of approach it this way or I’ve got this bag of tricks I can use. But up there you’re like, I don’t really know how this thing functions and I don’t really understand this machine and maybe I’m missing the point. And there’s definitely some sort of magic in that. In a way, and this is probably overselling it a little bit, the sky sorta feels like Wind Waker in terms of like lots of dots and you desperately wanna get to the dot and there’s probably just like a tree on it or something. But once you get there, there’s the satisfaction of getting there and but I haven’t really kind of tapped into that part of the game yet. It’s something I need to do more of. We need to unlock your Zonai hyperdrive system which you unlock right after your Zonai large Hadron Collider. So just look forward to it. I mean, like, there’s quite a confusing economy around like this new Zonite material which buys like more energy to put in contraptions. So your contraptions can kind of go further. And I put a lot of time into buying my first upgrade and the upgrade was so piddly. Like what I actually got for putting in the time was, you know, I actually barked out laughter at how stingy it was being. It’s a little bit like, I guess it’s like a third resource alongside hearts and stamina is kind of Zonite electricity. And the rate it goes up, I’m like, well, I am not getting to a lot of this stuff anytime soon. So that’s a bit of a bummer. But fundamentally, like, I love jumping down, like skydiving and seeing the map just be there is really, really nice. I really love going up these things that kind of fire you into the sky. And like, there is something absolutely perfect about it’s tipping down with rain. You’re in like a waterlogged region, you’re having a real shit time of it. You fire yourself at a tower and you kind of punch through the rain clouds. And it’s like perfect calm above the clouds. And the light suddenly changes. And you’re like, that is amazing that that can happen in a game. Like that is a, like that’s a thing, that’s a moment. And it’s a moment you can just have again and again. Like I’m storm chasing, just to kind of punch through the storm and see what happens. Yeah, that’s really good. That’s cool. I think as well, I quite like the idea with The Floating Islands of there being some larger mobility challenge. I mean, something you have to build up towards, some kind of power curve in like transportation that is beyond the sort of challenges you have in Breath of the Wild of like how am I going to reach this if I don’t have enough like, you know, stamina to climb there and that sort of stuff or I can’t glide there or like how the hell do you get over there, how do I get up there, those kind of questions. But I guess more tapping into your mastery of the crafting system as a how do you get there or some other system that might be in the world that is as yet unrevealed. So, yeah, interesting, but yeah, Wind Waker, obvious comparison, perhaps that kind of makes sense. The idea of like, because you can see the shadow of these things when you’re on the ground, because you look up and you see them and then also stuff falls from them sometimes onto the overworld, there’s that sense of, oh, it’s it’s kind of teasing me. The map is teasing me. It’s telling me this is up there somewhere if you can get there. And yeah, that’s a cool notion in an open world game. You know, I like that. Yeah, yeah, and it’s it’s it’s worth reading the interviews actually on the Nintendo site with the team because one of the interviews is basically about them talking about how substantial the sky realm should be because they’re like, if you feel it full of shit, it looks terrible from the ground. You look up and they said it just looks like it’s full of garbage, like floating around like space, I guess. And they’re also talking about the size of the islands because they’re like, if they’re too small, they just look like nasty specs. They look it looks like something’s gone wrong with the game, so it really feels like they wrestled like that’s too much. That’s too little. You know, scale it back, scale it back. And I think they are actually quite quite a lot of self control about how they like deal with it. It’s funny because it looks it looks very unsubstantial from the ground. But sometimes when you’re up in it and it’s all kicking off, you’re like, oh, this is quite cool. Actually, it’s quite a lot going up here. But yeah, it’s the area on like, I definitely need to see see more of of the story chunk I’ve done. The kind of the dungeon for that took me into the skies, I’ll say. I don’t know if they all are up in the air, but it was like the ascent to it. Absolutely spectacular. Like just a brilliant set piece that involved like crazy trampolines. It’s like something out of Mario Galaxy. It was just like platforming on an epic scale. It may be a more scripted moment, but I was like, that is just so good. Yeah, really good music as well. I just watched Catherine do it again. So I was watching her do the whole set piece. Because that’s the bummer with these games is they’re like a hundred hours. And there are things in them that will only ever happen once, which is like a pain. I felt the same in Breath of the Wild. I quite liked the approaches to the Divine Beasts, those little cinematic moments where you were like skidding around, sort of shooting out the feet in the desert and things. And you’re like, it’s a shame I’d have to play another 50 hours of this to see this again. But yeah, that was kind of like the only example of it in Breath of the Wild, too, really. Those those instances of scripted set pieces, that and obviously the fire boss fight. And so the idea there’s more in this. It’s not related to this, maybe not as momentary as quite interesting. Okay, intriguing there. Conversely, then, Matthew, which I didn’t actually know about until, well, I suppose the trailers gave it away when you saw like a minecart below ground, you know, as that saxophone was popping off in that trailer, as discussed in a previous episode. Underground is like a substantial part of this game, too. So I was curious if you think the presence of underground sections in this game helps address that one issue people leveled against Breath of the Wild was that it didn’t have the traditional Zelda dungeons. And I know that some, you know, trad Zelda fans did like brush up against that and thought maybe it was a step too far away from that. But it sounds like this is not a course correction as such. We discussed this a little bit in the first part. But does this do you think this element in particular is like them saying, we’ve put dungeons in Breath of the… We put dungeons in Tears of the Kingdom now for you because we knew you missed them in Breath of the World. I mean, I’d say what’s down there isn’t really dungeons. I’d say there are dungeons which are like the Divine Beasts, which are in the story, like those story missions. What’s kind of under the ground is like, it’s just a sort of a realm unto itself, like an incredibly dangerous place. It has it basically, if the air has its own exploration mechanic, which is like, how do you move? How do you fly between these places? And the ground has all the navigation mechanics, you remember from the first game, you know, climbing and gliding, now with these contraptions. Underground has like its own vibe again. It has like its own rhythm and focus. It’s a lot more about, I’d say, a tentative expedition. It’s very dangerous, it’s very dark, and it’s about like managing that space and making it safer for yourself. I’d say it does something that people really celebrated in Elden Ring, but it does it for real. Like it actually goes big in a way. You’d be like, oh, surely it’s not as big as this. And then you’re like, it gradually dawns on you. Oh, it is as big as this. This is crazy that they’ve done this. I kind of love it down there. I’ve spent a lot of time in the darkness. I’m like fucking Bane. I love that when you jump down holes to underground, the music starts playing this fucking evil saxophone riff, as if to go like, this is like things are getting dark and messy. It’s like some dark jazz down here. Is it like an end game zone? Is that the kind of thing they’re going for? No, that’s what’s interesting. I think the nastiest stuff is down there, but there’s safer stuff. The main storyline will take you down there. What’s confusing about this game a little bit is that you have what I would say is the main story. And then it has what I think they call side adventures, which are different to side missions. Side adventures are kind of like game long narratives that you’ll follow a thread through the game, which is obviously we’ve seen in loads of other Western open world games. You know, more like, I don’t know, maybe like companion quests is maybe the best sort of like way of describing them. And some of those will kind of take you down into this area and give you more of a foothold. But like you’re free to jump into the fucking nastiest corner of the underground from the start and to see what what like awaits you and whether you can survive. But it just yeah, it just has such a different flavor to what’s going on above. Like it really does feel like, you know, like not mining, but it feels like you’re pushing into the gloom and you’re very kind of, you know, you’re only a shrine teleport away from escaping it. But there is this sense of like, oh, this is quite overwhelming and scary down here. Right. Well, that’s cool. That’s a cool addition. So yeah. So what would be described as dungeons does exist, but is not tied to that underground space as such? No, I’m not. Well, I mean, there might be dungeons down. I don’t, like I said, I’ve only done one dungeon. I’ll describe that. You could see its relationship to the Divine Beasts in terms of maybe like size, but it had its own vibe to it. You know, I think one of the things, again, they talk about in the interview in this, they didn’t want it to be like, there are these four structures which have the same aesthetic. They were like, we’re building these specific kind of, they’re thinking more like traditional Zelda dungeons. Like, this is the water dungeon. This is the wind dungeon. And like, what would that look like? And what’s the concept of that? Like I say, I’ve done one of them. Like, I’d be intrigued to see if any of them get like much bigger and do some like wild stuff. I have no idea of whether it does this or not, but you know, obviously it’s pointing me in four directions from the start. I am intrigued if there are more dungeons beyond that to like bring it more in line with traditional Zelda. But I, you know, I won’t know until I get there. Interesting. Well, hmm, where to sort of like go from here really? Because, you know, it’s that thing of like, there’s so much more for us both to uncover in this game. I can’t even begin to wrap a verdict around it at this point. I’m just like overwhelmed by how strange this experience is as a sequel. And like how my own expectations have been upended a little bit by, I guess, the structure of it maybe being slightly different to what I anticipated. Because it is bizarre that it starts with this story. It’s kind of got more cutscene in the opening that you get throughout the entirety of Breath of the World, unless you go looking for the individual cutscenes really. Or maybe like any Zelda. Yeah. Like, yeah, it opens with an interactive cutscene. That’s crazy for a Nintendo game. Yeah, very different vibe. Like you say, this is where there are instances of this where maybe you see them paying attention to how other maybe Western developers are doing it somewhat as well. Yeah, so quite unusual in that respect and then dumps you on this island. I find it quite funny that the game is sort of like, you know, it’s not a spoiler to say that something happens to Zelda. As Matthew points out, it’s actually quite hard to work out what has happened to Zelda in this story. But it’s quite funny that you’re like, oh, no, I’m separated from Zelda. And then five minutes later, I was like cooking some mushrooms and Link was like, hey, I was like, oh, there is his back to his real passion in life, which is making mushrooms. And he’s over it now. It’s fine. He sings when he cooks now as well, which I really like. He sings little bits of old Zelda tunes. Yeah. Okay. Here’s something I really wanted to quiz you on, actually, because the thing I struggled with a little bit in the opening besides the controls for the crafting was the fact that the power curve resets and you’re back to three hearts and you’re back to low stamina. Now, this is not completely unexpected, obviously, in terms of how a new game experience tends to work. But I will admit to feeling a bit weary at the idea of fighting enemies I’d fought for 70 hours, except now I was dying to them in that opening area. And I wondered how you felt about that and the power curve of the game in general, because you’re further along than me. I’m sure you have more hearts than me, more stamina than me, obviously more zone-eye goodies than I do. How do you feel about the power curve in this game generally? Yeah, like, I’m kind of okay with it. I think mainly because there are a lot more enemy types in this game. So the sense of like, oh, I’m just doing these fights again. I mean, you’re right, you definitely fight a lot of stuff you’ll be familiar with. But there’s loads of stuff like there’s a lot more classic Zelda enemies in this, which is like part of the fun of like discovering it again and sort of working out the kind of gimmicks with them. Like, generally, like, I liked messing around. I like using the new stuff on them. But because, like, I think a lot of new ideas have clicked with me, you know, and I kind of bedded in quite quickly with them. Like, I maybe haven’t had that same. I think the two go hand in hand, basically, you know, like, I think the sense of those fights feeling kind of renewed and refreshed kind of hinges on, like, really being into, like, fusing stuff and, you know, fucking around with contraptions or some of the other new kind of gimmicks in it or whatever. And if those things are still, you know, not you’re keeping them at arm’s length, you’re slightly suspicious of them, you’re probably going to jump in with traditional tactics and it probably is going to feel a lot more like Breath of the Wild as a result, which is what it sounds like sort of happening with you a bit. I will say, yeah, once I started getting some of the new items, though, and started messing around with them, like, the new ingredients and the fact that you can, like, you confuse stuff, but you can also just throw any object you have in your hands. So, like, if you have a bomb, you could attach it to an arrow and shoot it and it’ll be a bomb arrow, but you could just also throw the bomb. I’ve had quite a lot of fun, like, messing around with enemies in that kind of a slightly immersive, simmy way of, like, using these, like, weird plants to, like, fuck with people. And there was this quite horrible difficulty spike around this sort of village that had been attacked by pirates, and you have to clean out all these enemies, and there’s quite a lot of really nasty stuff there. But once I worked out I could start using these, like, puff shrooms to basically use them as, like, gas grenades to lay down cover and then sneak in and, like, shank people. It suddenly became, like, actually quite a good stealth set piece. I had a really good time doing that, and I felt like I was only really engaging with, like, the core ideas of Breath of the Wild. I wasn’t doing any zonai madness or anything around the edges. I think there’s just a lot here. It just maybe takes a while to kind of click in, click into it, and once you do, it really does kind of reinvigorate a lot of those enemy encounters. Like, I’m actively seeking people out now, which I probably wouldn’t have done in Breath of the Wild. Like, if I ever saw, like, a tree house full of moblins, I’d be like, fuck that, and just run past it after a point. But in this one, I’m like, no, I’ll go and mess with them. Hopefully, one of them will chuck an explosive barrel at me and I’ll just reverse time the barrel straight into his face. Reverse time does a lot of heavy lifting in a lot of situations in this game. Yeah, and I think it is an interesting point about the combat generally in Breath of the Wild that it’s sort of like you’ve sort of seen a lot of what it’s got to offer quite early on. And this game, by taking that immersive sim element that step further in terms of the amount of different, you know, ways you can affect enemies with status effects and stuff like that, means that, you know, like you say, it is encouraging experimentation in a way that the original game was not doing. So, perhaps they identified combat as an area where they needed to shore it up somewhat or give you, or they saw that the strengths of the first game were what happens if the, you know, you push a rock off of this cliff onto these, onto these goblins, what happens? Yeah, yeah, et cetera. So, that is exciting that they’ve added that, you know, freezing enemies, setting them on fire, all that kind of stuff, or just, you know, loads of other different status effects that, you know, you are just encouraged to play around with and see what the outcome is. Yes, okay, interesting. So, I suppose, Matthew, to wrap up, is there anything else you wanted to sort of discuss here, or regale us with from your experience of the game so far that kind of reinforces how positively you feel about it? Oh, God, I should have had a killer anecdote. I should have put this in the episode plan, to be fair, instead of out pushing you with it. Again, I guess not to keep banging on about the story elements, but I am surprised how much it has hit me to be with all these people and who I knew in Breath of the Wild. Breath of the Wild is reasonably sparsely populated, given the size of the world. There are a handful of villages. And actually going back to those villages and seeing how things had moved on or changed, I really love that. I think it’s shown off how good these characters are drawn. There’s no voice acting in the game. Obviously, it’s all just done in text. But they’re so brilliantly realized. And maybe this is just like… This is recently biased. This is what I’ve been doing for the last couple of days, is filling out the map and visiting all my old haunts. But going back and seeing all these things that you set in motion in Breath of the Wild have been realized or acted on here. And everyone kind of remembers you. And like a lot of the side quests are like riffing on side quests you did in Breath of the Wild. I mean, I only really know this because I played Breath of the Wild so recently. Going straight into it, I’m like, oh yeah, these are like… They really have sequeled everything in this game. You know, it’s kind of crazy. It’s like, you know, the weird guy who had a kind of crush on someone in the village and asked you to do something for him. Well, he’s now got a weird crush on someone else in the village and wants you to do like a very similar quest. And the game’s quite kind of winky about that kind of stuff. And yeah, and like the Tarry Town stuff is so good. Like, I love that place. I loved building that place in the first game. And just the kind of magic of going back to your old haunts is like really, really special. And I’m struggling to think of another open world that’s done it quite this way in terms of, you know, it’s literally kind of like inch for inch the same place, but you can just see how everyone’s getting on now. Even all the generic stable masters who you didn’t give a fuck about. A very mild spoiler, you can skip ahead two minutes if you don’t want to hear about this, but I know it will make you laugh, Sam, unless you’ve already done this. Have you done the newspaper stuff in this game? No, I just, I haven’t counted it though. And I’ve been told about an editorial office that exists somewhere. So that’s on my list of things to do. There is a substantial side story in this game about Link becoming a freelance journalist. Which is just, it’s so, it’s just so perfect, the life of the wandering journalist. But he’s like, it’s kind of like Bath Chronicles style, you know? It’s like local interest stories getting paid, like fucking fuck all. But if you do enough of them, you can get a, like you get fabrics to kind of customize your paraglider. And my paraglider has now got like newspapers all over it. And every time I open it up, I’m like, print is alive and it’s soaring above Hyrule. This is how it should be. Incredible. How can you not fucking love a game that lets you do that? Well, I mean, us specifically, that feels very tailor-made, but that is so specific an idea, though. The idea of like, I do always like it when there are in-game newspapers and you get to see the innards of that organization. See also, you know, Final Fantasy 8 or indeed the Yakuza series. There’s some of that to it as well, isn’t there? Right. So, yeah, I do. I like that notion, but the idea of him becoming a freelance journalist, that’s super funny. I love that. I love the idea of you flying around with print media on your glider. That’s just like, well done. Well done. That’s really good. It’s just there’s just a lot. There’s a lot to love here. It’s just that kind of constant level of just amusement for me. So, yeah, I’m having a really good time with it. And I know that we will come back to it and hopefully be able to say some more profound thoughts about it. Yeah. But like, I feel like I’m nibbling at everything that’s there, you know, without committing to any of it, you know, because I just I want to sort of savor it. Yeah. This is the other thing, right? The reason I played around 10 to 12 hours of it is I do not want to burn through this because that is not how I played Breath of the Wild. I did play Breath of the World in like three hour chunks basically for about three months, two months, something like that. And so by the end, I played it for 70 hours. I’ve seen every corner of the map and I’ve done many of the shrines. I felt like I had a comprehensive experience. And I would rather push towards that in my own time than burn through it because they only make one of these every six years. So why go through it all of it in a week, you know what I mean? So yeah, there’s a bit of that to it. Although having said that, you took a week off to play it. So what do I know, Matthew? What a fucking dweeb. Not at all. You’re just very committed. And I’m sure the listeners of this podcast appreciate your takes, you know. It doesn’t get bigger than a Zelda or a Mario. Zelda and Mario, they’re the main event. Very rare that I get to like just enjoy one of these things as a punter. So I guess that should be that should be treasured. And it’ll probably take them another five years to make another one. Yeah, which will they will they leave this high rule? Who knows? Yeah, it feels like whatever comes next will probably not be the same thing again, remixed or like, you know, using this as a basis. But who knows? It’s way too early to speculate about that. They should just keep returning to this place every six years and just seeing like everyone grow up. And that’s what Yakuza did. We don’t complain that Yakuza is basically the same eight streets for like fucking 10 games. Yeah. And this is like 800 kilometers. Yeah, and everyone’s like, oh, God, not 800 kilometers of this place again. That is one thing I like. I must say in its favor is that while the topography might be familiar, the framing of the world is very much not similar. Yeah, it’s amazing how much of a difference a load of rocks having fallen and everything makes. There being no guardians. So basically, Hyrule Field is now a really chill place. It’s like probably one of the best grassy plains in the whole game. But in the first game, it’s full of horrible fucking robots. And also by moving around the lookout towers, which I don’t know if you play like this, but I fast travel to those a lot as a base of operations. But just by them being in different places, you naturally start taking different routes around the map. There were certain parts of the map, like if you had a heat map of where I’d been, which is an unlockable thing with the TLC, of course, I would often stick to the same roads because they were the ones that I would naturally reach from each tower. But here, like, you’re automatically in a kind of different mindset. It’s, I think a lot, it’s psychological, but it really, like, I haven’t, I’ve honestly not thought like, oh, fuck this place again, which I thought was going to be like a big problem. But, yeah. Okay, yeah. Amazing. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Like it’s, I can’t think of many other examples of this, but like the GTA DLC for GTA 4 reminds me of that a little bit where it’s like, I know this is, I know I’m looking at the same space, but A, they’ve obviously filled this world with completely new, different content. You know, so it doesn’t feel the same in that respect. But like you say, there’s just, there are so many other things that you do with the framing to make it feel somehow like a foreign land again, because you are trying to reconcile with how much has changed since you were last there. Very impressive. The Ballad of Gay Hestu. Excellent. There you go. Round of applause for Matthew Castle there. I wish I could think of a character that rhymes with Tony. Well, you know, maybe the next time we do a Tears of the Kingdom podcast, you can have that in the back pocket, you know. Just like, yeah, check back in two months for a much better gag. We’ll see how we get on. OK, this podcast. Thank you so much for listening, as ever. We can be followed on Twitter at backpagepod. I’ve somehow forgotten how this works, the outro. I don’t know why that is. patreon.com/backpagepod if you’d like two extra podcasts a month. This month we’ve done 50 moments in games that make us go, Oh, no, including all kinds of horseshit about Kingdom Hearts, Summons and Donald Duck and all kinds of rubbish. That was quite fun. And the XXL episode, which we’ve not recorded at the time of the time you’re listening to this yet, is going to be the best TV episodes of all time. All that fun stuff. You can also email us at backpagegames.gmail.com. We are doing another Gamescore episode at the end of this month. So if you would like to submit your entries late on, you can do that. And then we will judge Matthew Castle. We’ll deliver judgment. We’ll see how that pans out. Forcing ourselves to do a Gamescore again should be fun. Matthew, where can people find you on social media? At MrBattle under score pesto. I’m Samuel W. Roberts. Thank you so much for listening and we’ll be back next week.