I'll be avoiding this thread until launch. I avoided TOTK footage after its debut trailer, and it made for some real wow moments in the tutorial. I'm not expecting this game to provide anything quite as mind-blowing, but I'm looking forward to going into another Zelda game (mostly) blind.

@nate38

This is pretty much my strategy too. Even in the initial E3 reveal, I saw more than I'd have liked! I saw the name of a new ability they revealed the other day, and just the name alone has me thinking of all the possibilities...

The first few hours of Tears of the Kingdom with no prior context were magical.

@nate38@Secret_Tunnel

'I only started/entered this thread for directions on how to get away from this thread!.'

Come on guys.

So should we... talk about the trailer?

It really does seem like a 2D take on BotW's sandbox, with multiple solutions, physics interactions, and such. I wonder if the chemistry system has been fully brought over. That would be cool as shit. I also wonder how breakable the game will be.

Also, the horse looks so fun! I hope they add some areas where we can really let it loose. Speaking of which, Nintendo sure loves reusing locales, huh? I'm not really sure how to feel about them trotting out LttP Hyrule yet again.

@Anand

I've seen a few good map analysis videos, and even though it looks like it's based on ALttP at a glance, there's actually a lot of differences; this definitely isn't an ALttP/ALBW situation; this is more like an OoT/TP situation.

I'm really excited for this game, but sadly I think the thing that I'm most excited about is an explanation for the rifts. We already have a couple of unanswered questions from previous games dealing with dark realms (i.e., what was the darkness that ALBW Ganon was sealed within, and what was the Dark World from FSA since it clearly wasn't the same place as the Dark World from ALttP), so I'm really hoping this answers at least one of those questions/provides enough theory fodder for us to head canon an answer to one of them. ...But I'm preparing myself to be disappointed in that regard.

The echo and bind mechanics look like a lot of fun to me.

@Shadowlink
Yup that's so totally me right now!

...Wait what was I doing in here again?

New trailer dropped yesterday!

...I didn't watch it.

...hype!

Lowest rated Zelda game ever? Nintendoomed??

Nah, I basically consider high critical reviews to be an anti-recommendation at this point. They do not value the same things I do in games, which is fine, but we're essentially talking about different mediums at this point.

Pikmin 4 has an 87 and Shiren 6 has an 84. This'll be great.

@Secret_Tunnel Well, Zelda II and Triforce Heroes scored lower. Either way, being low scoring for a Zelda is still a high bar.

I've preordered this game but I don't think any of us were expecting it to be, like, the next Breath of the Wild or anything. I'm sure it'll be great regardless.

Wait, it came out LAST night!?

...it's out NOW!????

YES.

I was going to try it last night but it came out at midnight my time and I was too tired to give it a fair shake.

I played hooky from work-from-home and played for a couple hours this morning, up through the first dungeon.

It's good! Chattier and more linear than ALBW, so far, but the very beginning was excellent and the puzzles have all been great, and I think the game's opening up now. I've died twice on Hero Mode so far. Excellent!

You've gotta relax into the combat. Don't treat it like a regular Zelda game but with nerfed abilities, treat it like a whole new experience where every enemy encounter is a puzzle.

Didn't have time to play yesterday, so I'm only a couple of hours in, and definitely still in the part of the game meant to tutorialize, but I loooove it so far. There are so many neat little touches, so much love that's gone into everything I've seen so far, and even though things have been linear, I still feel creative and awesome experimenting with the echoes.

This kind of shit is why Nintendo always comes first for me.

Like, even the small stuff with monster echoes feels fantastic. Using an Ignizol to start a grass fire to deal with a measly rope snake, then stealthily unleashing that snake echoe to bite a moblin in the butt and watch him panic. 10/10 shit right there.

I've been playing this quite a bit since Thursday, I'd guess about 15 hours or so. Five dungeons down and a bunch of sidequests in the areas I've explored. Haven't gone into the central north or northwest of the overworld at all yet.

So far, I think this is a special little Zelda game. It's a very nice mix of 2D Zelda's snappy pace and the freeform playfulness of modern 3D Zelda. My only complaint is it can be a bit long-winded, and lacks the charismatic oddity of its closest sibling Link's Awakening (and Link's Remakening).

Anyone else basically skip the dungeon in the southeast? I feel like the game is not shy about letting you use echoes to go right from the entrance to the boss key/door. I went back through the whole dungeon for completion's sake, but thought it was a neat and surprisingly beginner-friendly way of SPEEDRUNNING past the intended path.

I'm just two hours so this is very preliminary. It's charming and fun and very Nintendo-y. I like how they're kind of combining the scale of a top-down Zelda with the open-ended puzzling of the more recent games. It actually reminds me a lot of how I felt about Super Mario 3D Land at the time, not a bad thing at all.

That said, the menu navigation is already bumming me out, even at this stage. I only have a couple dozen echoes but the stop-and-start aspect of puzzle-solving and especially combat makes me worried about what's in store later. Does this ever get smoother?

@TriforceBun Not that I've seen, no. You can only have one echo active at a time, so any time you want to use more than one at once, you'll need to open up the menu.

Holy balls this game has a lot of talking. I alternate between thinking the tri-rod is really cool and thinking it's kind of the same thing as using items in any other Zelda game (but slower), but it's hard to tell, because it feels like half my playtime has been fetch quests and cutscenes! The first two dungeons were cool (and I adored the mid-bosses), but the water one was trivial and all of the other still realm sections have felt similarly simple.

I was very nervous about the chattiness we saw in TOTK and Pikmin 4, and this is worse...

Haha, I managed to beat the whole fire dungeon without realizing you're supposed to pick up your flying enemies and use them to glide on the air currents. I knew I was missing something.

See, this is what I like! Moving through space, solving puzzles, improvising. When the game is focused on this, it's great.