This idea of pose that you're exploring feels downstream to something I've been considering since beginning EOW: the Zelda series is seemingly trying to figure out if its future is in the past. TOTK and EOW are by turns more "traditional Zelda" than BOTW was. Forward progress seems to be, in some ways, about regression. Return to classic dungeons, return to classic aesthetics, return to classic structure/progression. Obviously we're marrying that return to prior form with this open-ended sensibility. I was interested to hear Aonuma in particular affirm (in EOW's Ask the Developer discussion) that the new unsupervised approach to problem-solving was what now defined Zelda.
I loved EOW because it managed to join these two competing sensibilities better than TOTK was able to. While I love BOTW, I don't think that's an inherently repeatable framework. TOTK felt rote and over-encumbered: it lacked the sense of spontaneity and natural discovery of BOTW. There's an immediacy to the puzzle-solving in EOW and moreover a sense of handheld-centric design that I love and have been missing from Zelda for a decade (LA remake aside).
I'd cede any points about the narrative because you make a pretty airtight case against the script. But I also don't really value (or pay much attention to) scripted narrative in 95% of the games I play. That's my bias I suppose: to me game storytelling is found in action. The story of BOTW was my story of adventuring down to Lurelin village before ever finding Kakariko or defeating a Major Test of Strength shrine before finding a minor one. Cheesing a puzzle, climbing a massive mountainside. I barely found any of the Memories, but those weren't the story to me. I felt as though TOTK tried too hard give you tools to manufacture similar a-ha moments, that felt less personal.
EOW succeeded again as BOTW did in my estimation, in that I found great novelty in how I went about solving little traversal or dungeon or combat puzzles. I felt like I had to engage with the environment and my echoes more closely in tandem, unlike in TOTK where I could just build a big contraption and object to whatever problem was put in front of me. I felt reconnected to the spirit of BOTW through EOW, which is to say I felt a sense of joy in exploration and puzzle-solving.
I think the only thing I push back against in your exceptional critique of the game is that idea that "We accepted the pose because it looked enough like the real thing." In my assessment of the game, I accepted the pose, or as I'd call it, the return to Zelda tradition, because it *felt* like a great marriage of what I loved about pre-BOTW Zelda and the present moment of the series. But I'm also a sucker for aesthetics, which I have to admit too.
I'm not sure I quite agree that the tractor beam doesn't expand on the concept of echoes. Almost immediately after acquiring it, you can use it to use to link yourself to the echoes you create - linking yourself to a spider to climb up a pillar or a bird to cross a gap, and so on. I agree that the game could dramatize that moment better, but the way you describe the ability in this essay would give someone who's never played the game the impression that the ability can't even interact with echoes at all.
Totally see where you're coming from! My perspective on the linkining function is that its interplay with the echoes is just kinda uninteresting. You attach yourself to a creature to move along with it or move it where you want. I wanted to make the point that, in other Zelda games, the function you get out of that ability would be relegated to individual tools (bombs, boots, Ascend, etc.) When I got that ability it felt like the game was trying to convince me I got something new and interesting, but I found it to be extremely familiar to the point that the feature never had a moment that made it more attractive or revelatory to me than when it's initially given
Ah, I understand now. I'm only a few hours in the game, so who knows, I could end up agreeing eventually, although I've had fun with the ability so far.
Good essay! I agree with everything you said about the narrative and world building, even though I'm early into the game. That is especially jarring considering how much the game is lifting from Link's Awakening, a game that had some pretty striking moments despite the story still being fairly limited.
This idea of pose that you're exploring feels downstream to something I've been considering since beginning EOW: the Zelda series is seemingly trying to figure out if its future is in the past. TOTK and EOW are by turns more "traditional Zelda" than BOTW was. Forward progress seems to be, in some ways, about regression. Return to classic dungeons, return to classic aesthetics, return to classic structure/progression. Obviously we're marrying that return to prior form with this open-ended sensibility. I was interested to hear Aonuma in particular affirm (in EOW's Ask the Developer discussion) that the new unsupervised approach to problem-solving was what now defined Zelda.
I loved EOW because it managed to join these two competing sensibilities better than TOTK was able to. While I love BOTW, I don't think that's an inherently repeatable framework. TOTK felt rote and over-encumbered: it lacked the sense of spontaneity and natural discovery of BOTW. There's an immediacy to the puzzle-solving in EOW and moreover a sense of handheld-centric design that I love and have been missing from Zelda for a decade (LA remake aside).
I'd cede any points about the narrative because you make a pretty airtight case against the script. But I also don't really value (or pay much attention to) scripted narrative in 95% of the games I play. That's my bias I suppose: to me game storytelling is found in action. The story of BOTW was my story of adventuring down to Lurelin village before ever finding Kakariko or defeating a Major Test of Strength shrine before finding a minor one. Cheesing a puzzle, climbing a massive mountainside. I barely found any of the Memories, but those weren't the story to me. I felt as though TOTK tried too hard give you tools to manufacture similar a-ha moments, that felt less personal.
EOW succeeded again as BOTW did in my estimation, in that I found great novelty in how I went about solving little traversal or dungeon or combat puzzles. I felt like I had to engage with the environment and my echoes more closely in tandem, unlike in TOTK where I could just build a big contraption and object to whatever problem was put in front of me. I felt reconnected to the spirit of BOTW through EOW, which is to say I felt a sense of joy in exploration and puzzle-solving.
I think the only thing I push back against in your exceptional critique of the game is that idea that "We accepted the pose because it looked enough like the real thing." In my assessment of the game, I accepted the pose, or as I'd call it, the return to Zelda tradition, because it *felt* like a great marriage of what I loved about pre-BOTW Zelda and the present moment of the series. But I'm also a sucker for aesthetics, which I have to admit too.
I'm not sure I quite agree that the tractor beam doesn't expand on the concept of echoes. Almost immediately after acquiring it, you can use it to use to link yourself to the echoes you create - linking yourself to a spider to climb up a pillar or a bird to cross a gap, and so on. I agree that the game could dramatize that moment better, but the way you describe the ability in this essay would give someone who's never played the game the impression that the ability can't even interact with echoes at all.
Totally see where you're coming from! My perspective on the linkining function is that its interplay with the echoes is just kinda uninteresting. You attach yourself to a creature to move along with it or move it where you want. I wanted to make the point that, in other Zelda games, the function you get out of that ability would be relegated to individual tools (bombs, boots, Ascend, etc.) When I got that ability it felt like the game was trying to convince me I got something new and interesting, but I found it to be extremely familiar to the point that the feature never had a moment that made it more attractive or revelatory to me than when it's initially given
Ah, I understand now. I'm only a few hours in the game, so who knows, I could end up agreeing eventually, although I've had fun with the ability so far.
Good essay! I agree with everything you said about the narrative and world building, even though I'm early into the game. That is especially jarring considering how much the game is lifting from Link's Awakening, a game that had some pretty striking moments despite the story still being fairly limited.