MischievousMonkey
Gor bu dëgër
In the first video above, I chose "random" clips I had stashed along my playthrough, before twitter/x went to shyt and I found myself with no other way to upload directly from my switch. Nothing crazy, no frenetic set piece or cutscene, but just good old regular Tears of the Kingdom gameplay. The normal stuff. I did that on purpose to illustrate the following ramblings.
According to my switch, I have put about 170 hours into the game, and that's probably lowballing it since the system doesn't update its count instantly. I'd say I'm about what, half the "main" quest, if there's even such thing as a main quest in a non-linear game like that. Needless to say I'm having lots of fun.
One quirky thing I like to do whenever I play a game I'm enjoying is imagining what would be his reaction if 10 year-old me were to be by my side. Or, I suppose in some part of my brain that I'm actually showcasing exclusive gameplay from a title yet to come out, for E3, 15 years ago.
I don't know when exactly I started to do this, but I'm sure of what led me to this new habit: it's the only way for me to come to grasps with how amazing videogames have gotten.
I'm Link, and I enter some forest in Hyrule. Not the Hyrulean forest, not the forest biome or the forest zone of a game where you won't find any other elsewhere, but just a random forest, in the entire country of Hyrule that is at my disposal (it was the Dalite forest, south of Satori mountain). Sun is setting and the night will bring with it bright stars and Stalkoblins. So I pull out an axe, and get to chopping a tree. Once I cut the log down to manageable wood, I light it up with a fire fruit and spend the rest of the night next to my improvised campfire. At dawn, I feed my horse (that I caught and named myself) some apples and different types of carrots to make it ready for today's trip, and I lay on the ground varied monster parts that I collected after earlier battles. Time to create some new weapons. Then, I pull out a pot and get to cooking myself some cheese risotto. Where to go next? Outside the forest, there are many destinations that attract my eyes; will I attempt to climb the snowy mountains over there, that stretch so high in the sky their tips become blurry? Or should I follow the road down to the river and craft a boat to navigate the stream? Maybe I'll just explore the forest some more for an oddly placed rock or a flower that is just a little too shiny; and who knows, a cave and its treasure might hide behind the trees...
The fact that what I just wrote is not some promotional material for a Zelda game or some tabletop game master's speech is mindblowing to me. It's the reality of the game. Stuff that you actually think and do when you play.
Had you asked my 10-year-old self to describe the craziest things he wanted out of a Zelda game back then, with no restrictions... What I would have come up with wouldn't have sounded misplaced in Tears of the Kingdom. After all, I'm out there making a cheese risotto.
This is the reason why when I imagine my reaction, or the one of others, if we somehow had the opportunity to catch a single glimpse out of such a game back then... I can't do anything but conclude that I live in my own gaming utopia.
And that's not just Zelda.
When I play games like Marvel's Spider-Man, swinging all around the place and chasing Electro through New York in a fluid high-speed chase, I get the same kind of "restrospective" high I have with Zelda.
Eldin Ring, The Last of Us 2... Besides progress in presentation and graphics, games have attaigned a level of scope in what's actually actionable that is insane to me.
I'm not even just talking about AAA gaming. There's a constant deluge of indie games which quality rivals what we used to consider AAA back then. Incredible games like Hollow Knight, Katana Zero, and so many more, produced by very small teams for very small prices in amounts so large I'll never get to play half of them, if they even make it to my knowledge.
My brother and I would have spent our lives on Sifu if it would have dropped back then.
All in all, I'm having a blast playing games.
I don't understand yearly convos about how terrible games are nowadays. My brain cannot compute them. And maybe it's because it's stuck in the past, so everything feels amazing in comparison. Whatever the case may be, I'm ecstatic about it.
Last edited:
