My Dual Sense (PS5 controller) got drift again, so no Monster Hunter this week.
- Half-way through Soda Jungle in New Super Mario Bros. U Deluxe (one good thing about Super Mario Wonder, is it’s smaller name)
- Didn’t play much Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney, want to fix that this week.
- Not much to say about Dragon Quest XI, it’s trudging along.
- Started Deathloop as it’s leaving PS+ Extra, but couldn’t get into it, so dropped it.
- After Deathloop, I wanted to play some kind of shooting game, so stared Remnant: From the Ashes. Loving the game, it’s not as hard souls-like, but it’s still a tough game, I guess more of a souls-lite. Loving the game, and that’s taking most of my time now.
What about you guys? What have you been playing?
Really? Sure, they carried over some assets and the shape of the overworld map is the same… but most of the stuff ON the map, the chasm map, the sky map, cave systems, new abilities, a crafting system that makes the durability mechanic suck less, new characters, new ways of earning korok seeds, the president hudson puzzles, the shrines are all different (and overall more difficult, thankfully) … there’s so much new, unique stuff in this game that it’s sometimes overwhelming to me, and I 100%ed BOTW twice. I think you’re over-fixating on the fact that the games have the same engine.
My problem was that it had the same gameplay loop. Find shrines to upgrade your health and stamina. Find Koroks to upgrade inventory space. Many of the Koroks were even in the same place as the previous game. I didn’t do any Koroks that required more that 2 seconds of effort because in the time it took to carry a guy to his friend, I could have got 10 more by picking up suspicious rocks. So it really just felt more of the same in that regard.
And honestly, I hated shrines in BotW, so I was very disappointed to not only see them come back, but for them to be the main part of the gameplay loop once again. And just the fact that so many things were in the same places as in BotW felt lazy imo. I had to get all the same outfits again with the same perks.
It’s a weird feeling. I simultaneously felt like TotK was much better than BotW, but also I didn’t enjoy it as much, I think because I felt like I was just playing the same game again with a few new mechanics. It felt more like an expansion to me than a whole new game.
Yeah but some of that stuff doesn’t really do anything for me. The depths are alright, the sky map is too empty, with most of the islands looking nearly the exact same, the caves all have the same look. The abilities are cool, crafting is cool, new characters are nice. I hate everything about korok seeds, and the Hudson puzzles can easily be cheesed to the point that you can use the same solution for almost all of them.
Ah, well then it sounds like a lot of the new stuff just doesn’t go along with your tastes/play style. Nothing wrong with that. Meanwhile, I can’t help but explore every square inch, so the Korok seeds are a nice bonus for that; and I’m an engineer so I like coming up with crazy alternative solutions to the Hudson puzzles and shrines