[Destor]

I dont believe many were complaining. Critics were for sure. The sales figures pre-skyward sword though are very consistent. So i reject that those criticisms were widely held. SS bombedand nintendo looked at the critics and took that as the conclusion. That certainly happened.

SS bombed for two major reasons. Firstly by the time it released the Wii was for filthy casuals and only filthy casuals. Traditional gamers had completely moved on from the system and casuals, like people in nursing homes wanting to play wii bowling for instance, do not play single player adventure games. Secondly the game is brain dead. The few "hardcore gamers" that stuck it out with the wii shit on the game pretty hard. Because it was a tutorial hell with puzzles that thought you were twice as dumb as the tutorials did.

Is SS irredeemable? No. I replayed it on switch and its fine. With the handholding tutorials cut back it was much more breezy to play. Still painfully simplistic in its puzzle design but the narrative was good. I think it adds a lot to the great lore that makes it worthwhile.

To the greater game design conversation here though i think its a fundamental mistake for game designers to reject the central gameplay loop of a popular franchise. The narrative needs to be fresh. If you choose to have a narrative at all of course. But if i sit down to play the a new Tetris and instead making lines from falling blocks im suddenly tasked with growing Tetrinos in a garden before i drop them into perfect lines in the back of a dodge dakota to take them into market to sell them so i can buy new tetrinos tomorrow...im not playing tetris anymore. This is a fucking farming sim and im on to you.

You want iteration from a game. The game portion of the game isnt art. Technically. Art is subjective. The game portion of the game is a craft. Crafts master is function. The narrative is art. The music is art. The visual design is art. Blocks falling from the sky so i can push for a high score is a craft. So to that end I say they need to stop fucking around with the formula and let it be what it is. Let the blocks fall from the sky. Its why i bought it to begin with.

Which isnt to say the sandbox games need to go away. They have a market. But theres no reason to only make one vs the other. There's plenty of room on the playground. This new style has found a fandom. There's objectively a fandom for the older style too. No reason not to feed both.

The sales for TotK are very telling though. There's a clear drop off from BotWs numbers. I think that represents a skism in the fandom. Because there now exists two different games called Zelda but are not the same game. BotW everyone was on board. So it sold huge. A lotta people who bought BotW didnt return for TotK.

If the number holds to the next installment it will 1/3 of the BotW audience thats skipping new Zeldas. Thats a significant market and worth investing in.