u/BurmecianDancer

Hi folks - like the title says, I'm looking for something to listen to with my parents while we're on a roadtrip. Ideally:

1. No swearing. My parents are... uh... "sensitive" to bad words.
2. Nothing political in the slightest. We disagree a lot when it comes to politics and I don't want to accidentally start any arguments.
3. Nothing depressing. My mom in particular can't handle sad stories.

Would love to hear any of your recommendations. Thank you! :)

Wondering if this is just me or if it's all users... For maybe an hour, any time I try to do anything in Relay, I get the "failed to load content" error message that usually only pops up when the entirety of Reddit is down.

So apparently, Tears of the Kingdom came out 3 years ago this week! This is as good a time as any to post about my thoughts on the social-media reactions to it that I've waded into, intentionally and accidentally, since I played it back in 2024. Short version: I was, and still am, shocked at how much some people hate this game.

Best I can tell, The Hatred comes primarily from people who both a) loved BOTW to death and b) felt that TOTK betrayed BOTW via some combination of many shortcomings, one being a disjointed and retconning story. Another criticism centers on how TOTK is set in the same game world, using the same map and mostly the same monuments/points of interest; and that the ways in which TOTK differed from BOTW were not enough to justify the price tag of an entire game that should've been a DLC or expansion. Another beef is the wasted potential of both the Sky and the Depths, which were selling points in Nintendo's marketing push but fell well short of what a good chunk of the fandom was hoping they'd be. There are accusations of bait-and-switch/false advertising that revolve around this.

There are other unflattering observations people have made about TOTK, but those three are the ones I encountered the most. And those three were what prompted the biggest haters to leap right past the "I don't like this game" frame of mind and land squarely on "this game is objectively bad."

My initial response to The Hatred was, okay, glad to see that so many people on the Internet have still never bothered to learn what the word "objectively" means. My second thought was that these people played a completely different game than I did, because I had an absolute blast on my playthrough.

In a roundabout way, I really DID play a different game, because I had forgotten virtually everything about BOTW by the time I played TOTK. I also didn't enjoy BOTW when I played it, which prompted me to rip through it as fast as I could, kill Ganon, and sell my copy on eBay without hesitation. My lack of mental and emotional attachment to BOTW was a major factor in how much I loved TOTK, I think. I didn't even notice all the retconning/hand-waving that happened in the plot. I discovered so much stuff and visited so many landmarks that I never touched before. Everything was fresh.

Now, I do have issues with TOTK and I do agree with The Hatred here and there. Menuing was bad, especially when employing Fuse. The post-dungeon Demon King 😲 Secret Stone 😲 cutscenes were dumb and lazily-implemented. Enemies were repetitive. The dragon tear expositions should have been linearized. The subtitle should've been "Tears of the DRAGON (not Kingdom)" for obvious reasons. The rewards for sidequests should've been more impactful. The ghost companions should've been either more useful or less distracting (ideally both). The Sky and the Depths should've had more "holy shit, that's rad" moments.

But hell if I didn't have a great time for the 200+ hours I put into that save file. And I don't think TOTK "tricked" me into having a great time, as The Hatred has sometimes accused it of doing. And hell if I'm not VERY glad I stayed away from social media before I bought it and while I played it.

I'm glad I didn't know about Hoverbikes until after I beat the game. I'm glad I didn't know that Recall could singlehandedly (har har) trivialize many shrine and dungeon puzzles. I'm glad I never tried to break the game, either on my own or by looking things up online, because I think TOTK has the potential to be a very boring game for minmaxers. And, of course, I'm glad I didn't know about The Hatred until I'd finished all the shrines, found all the root things in the Depths, finished every sidequest that interested me, ignored all the sidequests that didn't, gone everywhere I wanted to go, seen all I wanted to see, done all I wanted to do.

I encourage anyone who's avoided TOTK, because of a frothing fraction of social media, to forget what you've read and give it a shot, going in as blind as you can manage. It's not perfect, but you might have a DAMN good time with it, same as I did!