The Besties - The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom Roundtable, Part One

Episode Date: May 19, 2023

It's Here! The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom has been out for a week, and in that time we, like you, have flung approximately three dozen Koroks to their deaths. But how's the rest of the game? Spoiler alert: (Very good.) Also discussed: Pokemon Scarlet and Violet Get the full list of games (and other stuff) discussed at www.besties.fan. Want more episodes? Join us at patreon.com/thebesties for three bonus episodes each month!

You know, I feel like this is going to be a bold statement, but I feel like there's one Zelda series that has not gotten enough love, and it is quite clearly the Of The series. Yes. Mm-hmm. I feel like no one's talking about the Of The series. No one's talking about Of The, and I know what that is. I know what that is too, Russ.

Yeah. Well, I know we got Breath of the Wild, Tears of the Kingdom. Yep. What else is in the Of the series? That's it. One of the Gamelon. Oh yeah, One of Gamelon is in it. One of the Gamelon.

Oh yeah. Mask of the Majora. Ocarina of the Time. Link of the Past. There's a lot of them, guys. Now that Russ has said his shit he said, I'm starting to pick up on it. Yep.

Yep. I feel like not enough people are talking about it. Let's do four of the swords adventures. Do you think that they stopped doing it for a while because Call of the Duty? Call of the Duty is good. Sit down, young one, and I will tell you the legend of the Zelda.

Legend of the Zelda. It down, young one, and I will tell you the legend of the Zelda. Legend of the Zelda. It began with a princess, and you are her knight. An elf. Also named Zelda. The Zelda. The Zelda. You're the Zelda. This is your legend of it. You are the

Hyrule of the Warriors. This is the Age of the calamity. Are you looking at a wiki of Zelda games? That's that, isn't that the knight? No, it is, it is. It's just there's no way anyone, when pulling from a list of like 40 mental Zelda games, would go to Hyrule Warriors Age of Calamity. There's just no way.

That's what makes me the best in of the business. Yeah, sure. My name is Justin McElroy and I know the best game of the week. My name is Griffin McElroy and I know the best game. My name is Christopher Thomas Plant and I know the best game of the week. My name is Russ Ruff, you're gonna have the best game of the week. This week we're gonna talk about Legend of Zelda. You guys mess with that cold open.

I messed myself up with articles. I'm going to say it right. The Legend of Zelda. Tears of the Kingdom. Okay, good. Chris, what's that? I believe it's the 30th Zelda game. Could that possibly be right?

That could be right is a big right open world that open sky open cavern sequel to like the best game ever made and the question is what if it's better whoa we're gonna talk about that bold fucking statement right after this okay i know we have a rundown and I want to go through the rundown I have an opening thought starter okay good is this and don't answer away is this the least

Zelda game the biggest departure is maybe another way of thinking about it is this like the least game that is least wedded in this frame to the the core of what this series is is this the biggest like departure from the the the the main the course if we don't if we don't count like fucking lynx crossbow training and all that jazz this is certainly like i'm not counting the cdi games right this is the

this is the weirdest way that zelda has asked you to play it i think george mask is probably the weirdest in my opinion yes but this is certainly up there you could still basically play this one like breath of the wild without some of the gimmicks but then you would be missing out on why this game is so spectacular. I'm glad that you started talking, Justin. I didn't really know how one begins shucking this particular oyster. Yeah, we had a rundown.

Yeah, I guess we do. We just go from the list that Plant came up with, which I think is a smart way of doing it. There's just a lot um the the story the story is interesting because it kind of kicks you off just uh with zelda just you and zelda i i can't remember i'm sure it's happened before this is the first one that feels like a sequel a like the first one that's like anyway you remember what happened in the last game well then some other stuff happened later yeah man even majora's mask is just kind of tangentially like it's chronologically clearly after ocarina of time right there's not like a ton of yeah and like spirit tracks and

shit like that yeah right yeah but this is the the one that is like i mean it's in the same map which they've never done before um i want to hear chris plant drop that story knowledge chris plant i want to know why are you doing this to me can we set up for our nervous listeners that we will not be going like wild spoilery oh yeah we can actually be specific here's what we're going to be covering this episode if you're worried about spoilers we're going to be covering the opening island which is like the first four to five hours of the game depending on how smart you are um and then we're going to be covering basically like early exploration everything before uh any of the uh temples but you could arguably take on any temple

at once we're not going to touch any of the temples so like figure like early centralized exploration stuff to give you an idea okay the the story here here's how i see it breath of the wild ended harmony is restored to hyrule kingdom relatively right cut to link and zelda are just having a nice time exploring a scary basement under the castle. Because why not? Why not go fuss with things? And while exploring, they find the desiccated body of Ganondorf? Someone.

We don't know who it is. We don't know. Just because it's always Ganondorf and it does look like him. It could be that guy with the mustache. Vaatu. Wait, Rickatu could be Demise. Are you thinking of Stacey Keach? Because he's an actor. Yeah.

And he's not in this series. That's not nice of Stacey Keach. He has a giant hand stuck on, like pinning him to the ground. And that hand's like, nope, I'm done doing this for a while. And that awakens. It's not exactly clear what triggers that. Yeah. It seems like somebody knocks

over a vase or something fuck it let's dig into what fresh said there in time do you think they just happen to be in the room at the exact well no no no actually somebody was not paying attention to this story the reason they were down there is because shit started to get weird and there's like ooze and shit spilling upwards so they went to investigate it that's true that's true anyway the thing wakes up uh zelda basically disappeared like straight up disappears into thin air starts appearing randomly throughout the world mystery involved and in link that hand basically melds with his arm uh which i guess was going to be amputated either way. Who knows, man?

It was pretty fucked up. What a wild thing to drop in a conversation. And then he gets the power of the Ultra Hand. And while all this is happening, giant rocks start just flying into the sky. Basically, I guess it was like an alternate or a pre-civilization, maybe buried underneath Hyrule, lifts up from the earth, and then takes to the sky. Oh.

Thousands of feet above you. I didn't. Really? I assume that's what that is, right? Like that's how the caverns are formed maybe too. I thought they were just up there to begin with. Oh, always? And we just never noticed during the old games.

You just didn't see them? They were too high up. Oh, maybe that could be it. I could be wrong. story the bulk of the story is delivered i would say from that point on in the same way that breath of the wild did it was just to say like there's a billion characters scattered around the world that will sort of give you there's lots of sub quests there's lots of main quests and characters who dole those out. And then there are sort of the equivalent

of what we had in Breath of the Wild where he would find, Link would find these memories of like the four guardians of the world and how shit got so, so very, very bad. This game kind of does that trick again, but I think I am finding the story to be way more again not going too deep into it but uh just a lot more enjoyable and complex a little i'm a

little disappointed that when they introduced zelda early uh and zelda is there with you i was kind of hopeful that this wouldn't be one where, like, she's missing, put in peril, you know, have to go rescue her. Which is, of all the things to, like, shake up, they've shaken up so much in this game. Right. It's weird to keep that, like, sort of trope-y thing around. It would be cool to treat Zelda like a person. around um it would be cool to treat zelda like a person yeah that intro sequence is the only time i can ever think of where you kick it with zelda yeah in the game and have your own little like rachel weisz brennan fraser mummy moment and i thought that would be kind of fun to have

one that actually has both of them in it i was i was a little bit hopeful that but i mean she's in it but you're right they're not like you know chilling together yeah yeah for sure i think spirit track she's a ghost that in habits of train spoilers sorry yeah sorry everybody um yeah it seems like i have not done the things that would trigger a lot of the like meta story because i you know i'm i've very only dipped a toe into the actual like overall story it's more like me fetching shit for people and doing little bacon pies and stuff like that but we're not going to talk about that yet because we're going to talk about i just want to talk about the abilities quite honestly and we can talk about the starting area and how we feel about that but largely speaking the starting area is built around these new abilities yeah and i have strong feelings

about them okay let's yeah well star of the show i don't think there's any question is the ultra hand super fucking awesome you could pick up anything that moves in the world stick it to other things build cars with it fucking rock shit out with that ultra hand and it's it allows for you know we were alluding to how weird this game is the most buck wild shit that has ever been in a zelda game in terms of like stuff you are actually doing and how much freedom it gives you it is insane and it actually made me think how wild it is when you go back and think about Breath of the Wild,

how few of those powers really had like, like Buck Wild's potential. Almost none. I mean, the kinetic storage power was the like big one. Stasis was cool.

Because you could like hit a rock and then turn that into a fucking cannonball that you ride halfway across the map. But the one that's just like, you make a block of ice right around or here's a bomb like here's a bomb it's that's nothing compared to kind of what tears of the kingdom gives you which is like make any make anything to solve this puzzle anyway it's it i can't believe it works i can't one i can't believe it works two i can't believe it works.

One, I can't believe it works. Two, I can't believe that it is not. I'm sure that there are ways to exploit it in a pretty standard strategic fashion. In my experience, it has not just been like, oh, well, here's my one solution for all these things um and i mean that first island you find these these blocks that sort of are zero gravity um and so when you apply force to them you can just kind of move them in any direction and it's a good like beginner way to teach you how you can use fans to move things or how you can use rockets to move things very fast and stupidly uh but i used it to accidentally skip like most of the tutorial area i was like oh i can just throw a fan on this and then over the course

of like five minutes of me just activating these fans and letting them recharge i flew all the way up into fucking outer space oh my god down and was like oh here i am right at the end i think i missed something uh i did something i did have to go back but like and i streamed me doing this and people were like hey stop stop stop you're doing it wrong stop stop stop but at the same time like i did go back and figure it out but i do love that i was given the ability to fuck up yeah so so completely and so delightfully uh i i was worried this shit was gonna get in the way of what i loved about breath of the wild and what everybody loved about breath of the wild but like it makes it makes breath of the wild seem awfully straightforward i think, in comparison. I want to call attention, if you play it, quote, properly,

which really the starting island is the only place where there is a seemingly proper order to do things as you're unlocking different abilities, there's a moment early on where you've gotten the Ultra Hand, you're like, okay, I can use these hooks and attach a platform underneath to like guide my way along this railing and you're like man i'm a fucking genius i'm gonna keep doing that and then you get to these rail cars that basically do the same thing it's like oh i'm crushing it and then i don't know if you guys had this experience out of nowhere one of the railings is just broken and you just fall to your death

and the only way to like get around that is by like doing a completely different thing and that was like oh i see they really want to like just mess with you and make you think you're a genius and then teach you knock you down a peg yeah and make you feel okay about failing yeah in in because you are going to like these i think the physics of this game are miraculous and i think this system works way better than i could have ever imagined but you do fuck up and the game kind of it's enjoyable enough to experiment that you uh it's never so terrible also there's a rewind power that you can use if you like build a glider and put these rockets on it and spend, you know, 10 minutes kidding it out.

Like this is my new beast. This is my machine. And then you accidentally bump it off a cliff. It just falls in the river. You can rewind it back into place where it was. And it all just kind of, all of that just conceptually clicks together in a way that is really staggering justin how about you which of these skills were you using the most i heard a little a grumble at fresh no i didn't grumble at anybody i love that i love

can you grumble grumble gr Grumble grumble grumble. I really... I think the Ultra Hand stuff is all super cool. I wish... I feel like I am a little bit less enthused about Fuse in practicality. I feel like the Arrow stuff, I actually like a lot. You can slap really easily, intuitively.

Not like you have to go digging through menus and do a bunch of annoying stuff. Really easily and intuitively slap something on your arrow that will give it homing capabilities or make it fly farther or fire, bomb, whatever. You name it. You slap it on there and you're good to go. And I think that stuff is all cool um i don't really like the constantly having to make new weapons um i'm just kind of defaulting to like the best thing that i have you know what i mean it's all very sort of like whatever i have the highest power i use that when that breaks I make the next highest power thing I can I mean I have a

wide selection of weapons but don't necessarily you know it's always full it's not like I'm usually like hurting for weapons and I found that like kind of cumbersome I wasn't

as entranced I think by the the fuse uh ability yeah i agree i think with the arrows it's it is more interesting i mean i like the idea of like you know a boulder with a really durable stick makes like a really good thing to break rocks with right and so in that case it's good but when it comes to like the first time you do it and then the next time you come across something that case, it's good. But when it comes to like- That's cool the first time you do it. And then the next time you come across something that requires that, it's like, well, got to find a stick and a rock and let me glue these together.

You know, it's more rote. It's more mechanical, right? It's not like you've done something like- Yeah, it's not as- It's also took me a while and I found it really annoying the way that you have to fuse with weapons like go through your inventory

find the thing you want, drop it and then do the that feels super clumsy to me in a way that like the ultra hand and the fusion with arrows and stuff it's all very streamlined yeah it's interesting that you can't do the melee attachment

the way you do the arrows yeah it's weird it would also be, I think that you can't do the melee uh attachment the way you do the arrows i don't really understand yeah it's it's weird it would also be i think it would not destroy the economy of the game if when you know you had a weapon that was about to break you could go into your menu and repair it with like the fused item yeah instead of having to go out and like find oh i gotta find a sturdy stick that i can attach another you know to so I can make a fire staff thing. If I could just go into the menu and click on the ruby and just re-up my weapon, it seems to me like you could just kind of cut out the middle man a little bit at that point. Yeah.

The feud stuff for me works with shields the best because you could do some awfully dumb stuff by fusing things. Have any of you fused a minecart to a shield yet? No, that's amazing. Why? Because you can shield surf in this game. So if you put a minecart on your shield, you can now skateboard in this game and it doesn't like tear up the durability of the shield.

I have a shield that I found that it's like 40 armor. It's like so dope and it's made of metal. It's sturdy as fuck and i was like i'm never using this in combat i'm gonna slap some new fucking trucks on this some new grip tape and then this is gonna be my carving board and sure enough if i'm on a mountain and i need to get down boom i bust out the minecart shield that's the funniest fucking thing i've ever heard i had no idea you could do that you can put a rocket on one of them and then it's just like a one-time turbo jump and it explodes at the end which is unfortunate but you just throw a rocket on your

shield and you just like iron man shoot up into the sky it's the it's so much better than the weapon implementation uh yeah arrows and shields great fuse i agree with that's so funny how do you even like what do you while you're shield surfing you can do that what do you mean like the rocket jump thing no you just do it from standing from the ground that's wild okay i gotta stick more oh yeah i haven't been using shields that much because i was like sometimes like i stuck like a flamethrower to one and that's been useful but it hasn't been like goofy as shit yeah yeah you trust me you guys just start experimenting because it's good. I want to talk about the last power that we haven't touched on,

and that is, I don't know what it's called. Up. It's the up power. Ascension? Ascent, yeah. Ascent. I think while not as buck wild necessarily from a level design standpoint,

the fact that this is in the game is insane to me. Yeah. It is the most infuriating power because I cannot tell you. I think the biggest challenge with this game is keeping in your head all the possibilities that you have. I can't tell you guys how many times I ran around for five minutes like,

what the fuck am I supposed to do? And it's like, can jump through the ceiling where is the exit i can literally levitate through the ceiling and fly out of anywhere like no problem at all like i would spend five minutes climbing something and i'm like oh fuck i gotta just jump right through the ceiling um it it is especially great in how it is utilized in the like 100 plus shrines that are in the game which return from 152 i think jesus christ um they in in the shrines unlike the rest of the world you can't climb so you can't just kind of brute force climb your way over every puzzle and so ascend i've done maybe like probably close to 40 shrines at this point. And then there are some that are truly, truly like cerebrally intimidating. And how you have to like move this block so that you can jump through it with ascend and then jump to the next platform so you can move that first thing back up.

And then attach it to another one to make like a staircase that then you can ascend through. It's it's ascend is like just suggested, like you use it constantly and it will take you forever to figure out like how to best do so. Plant, have you found anything buck wild about any of this stuff? It's not that it's buck wild. fuck wild about any of this stuff or it's not that it's fuck wild it's that i'm just blown away that they basically solved two of the hardest problems with the video game sequel with these powers and i think like that is like how do you make the people who didn't like the game or had trouble with the game honestly like me at times happy and then also how do you like play to the most hardcore fans and i think all the fuse and the ability to make all these like warships

and cars and all that stuff that is such a like hey i saw that you were using literally rocks and sticks to travel around the world what if we gave you you know any ship that you can imagine and then for like me my issues were i at times found the exploration was kind of frustrating and tedious because of all the climbing. In Breath of the Wild, you mean? In Breath of the Wild, yeah. And I didn't like the weapon, you know, breaking mechanic. And here, and I just didn't like that there were often things that I wanted to do and it was like, okay, but you need to go do blank, blank, and blank first. Like, go find an axe if you want to cut down a tree.

Where now I'm like, okay, I'll just make an ax or even a small decision that isn't this. You can get really easily a cold weather outfit like in the very first area, the very first sky island that you're on. Or you get pants, right? It doesn't have the full. I got pants. Yeah, you get pants. But outside of very, very cold areas areas it will be enough yeah um and like yeah i just felt like i am not i feel like it's making a lot more room for me to just

have fun and and while all i get why weapon breaking and all that stuff had to exist but this feels like such a great compromise on every on every note it's it's also i i enjoyed the first playthrough i had of breath of the wild it clicked for me in master mode because master mode was much more difficult and kind of required me to like engage with all of the systems that that game had in it like specifically uh cooking and making elixirs and leveling up your armor and using stealth at certain times. This game, I think, does it pretty good, walks the middle road between those two pretty well.

I have had some pretty challenging encounters in this game. A lot of one-shot kills from big boys and even medium-sized boys. Yeah, there's some regular enemies rolling around in this game, a lot of one-shot kills from big boys and even medium-sized boys that kind of caught me. Yeah, there's some regular enemies rolling around that will just like three hearts with a jab from their terrible spear. Yeah. Like no problem.

Which I was frustrated with at first, but then it's also like once I started to, you know, use the systems of the game properly, it wasn't, it didn't only just start clicking. It was like more enjoyable to go about those. Well, with that said, to use that as an example, I mean, the game has given you this incredible suite of tools. I kind of feel like that's a way of saying like, I wouldn't get close to that guy again.

Like I would figure out a different approach to this because that guy is mean. I wouldn't, I wouldn't mess with him him i may try arrows or something bud yeah whereas previously you would just fuck off and say like oh there's no way i could beat this guy here you could make a fucking rolling tank with a laser on the front of it and maybe have a shot oh man speaking of this is just a side thing but like good thank god that this game finally, this is the Zelda game, I think, where finally arrows just feel like an afterthought. Like, I've never had fewer than, like, 80, I feel like, at this point. No, I've run pretty low, actually.

Have you? Justin, have you gone into the depths yet? I think we're going to save that. I'll just say you will feel the pain of arrow needs. Really? Yeah. Well, that's in this game is worse than I thought it was. No, no, no.

It's good. It creates like it's we'll talk about this more next week, I think. Yeah. But the balance system between the three levels is so, so brilliant. It's very cool. Yeah. I've played it a lot in the four days that we've had our hands on it i i've played it a lot uh in the you know four days that we've had our hands on it i've played it a lot and i still feel that like new game smell panic of like i'm running

around the the ground world and then i shoot up into the sky and i'm like oh fuck well i'm gonna i know i was going over here but i'm to go check out these sky islands real quick. And then I'm going to jump into this big, big, big, big hole down into the depths. Oh, I'm just going to look around here for a little while. I feel like it is really, really hard for me to stay focused. About 25 hours in, and I have not done a dungeon yet. Big dork. Big dork.

I didn't realize you guys were such dorks. Oh, I was just going gonna ask very quickly the great sky island what was y'all's feelings on it as like a first place i i will say that even though i thought the powers and using the powers was amazing the only thing i found a little off-putting is that it's way more level designed than even anything in breath of the wild like if you think it of breath of the wild the if you think of breath of the wild the starting area breath of the wild it was like a natural area i think it's called a great plateau and it like feels realistic and kind of like okay this is like a wild area i get it whereas uh the

starting area in tears of the kingdom is like oh you have to get the mega hand use the mega hand to do this area next you learn how to do the raft next and i understand why that's all in there like you really do need to teach people how to build a raft and whatever but it yeah it just felt a little gamey in the way that the rest of the game doesn't feel that way i felt like it was trying to present as more open ended than it was like when i first stepped into it it felt like wow you trying to present as more open-ended than it was. Like when I first stepped into it, it felt like, wow, you can go anywhere. And then, yeah, eventually you get on a little bit of rails. I also think that's fine.

I think they're throwing so much at you that I don't really know how you do it otherwise. But, yeah. I will say as soon as I hit the ground and could look around and do anything I wanted anywhere, there was a part of me that was terrified because I had at that point had to- Take me back to the sky. A pretty, yeah, take me back to the sky. Even though I did the sky in a fucked up, bad and wrong way, I at least knew kind of where I was supposed to be going.

But you settle into that eventually. I want to, this is a very connected conversation, so I want to kind of force the break here so we can take a quick break and then come back and talk about more Zelda. If that's okay with you guys. Force it. I want to give a pro tip for the people at home.

Yeah, please. I was like five or six hours in and didn't know you could unglue stuff because I've been playing in proHUD the whole time and there's no tooltip for it. So every time you put two objects together using UltraHand you can separate them

apparently. I was trying to hit it with sticks. I was blowing it up. I was setting it on fire. Nothing was working. And then someone was like oh yeah they just tell you in the normal HUD. I will say yeah yeah, Russ, it's a good thing to point out that sometimes turning off the fucking UI

can make some of it a little bit more complex. Okay, but here's the thing. Here's what I'm going to say. Great observation. No, Frush, can I defend you? Because you convinced me to do this. Sure. Frush said, do this, do this, do this.

I ignored him for part of it. I did all of Great Sky Island with the hud probably a good idea that there would be like a lot of like tips in there but then the second i landed on the ground i flipped that pro hud i was really really worried about it not a problem in the least it has been so great playing the game without the hud and then just checking the map every now and then. I mean, that also is probably why I've not done a dungeon because I just go wherever

the awesome world takes me. But yeah, you were in fact right. Also, you were also right about switching to the Japanese audio. Oh yeah, I'm a genius. I don't want to give you too much credit, but you were right. I'm sure it's very good i i i usually that is uh aimed as i feel like a slight at the english voice acting which it is is also tremendous uh in in this game i do want to say one thing about

the hud the reason i did it and why i think it is okay for other people to do it too. This game is designed with many different touch points for you to know. For example, when you go into a place that's very cold and you'll take damage, there's actually an on-screen indicator of like wind blowing in your face saying, oh shit, it's too cold. You need to put clothes on, warm clothes in particular.

So there are a lot of touch points. I will say as well on the other side this game has leagues to go on the accessibility side there is a ton of stuff that is only communicated through audio with no subtitles or anything like that um like the shrine uh sensor thing is only audio so and there's no difficulty settings. Well, if you're playing with the HUD off. Sorry? If you're playing with the HUD off, there is a HUD element for the Shrine Sensor.

If you play with the HUD off, there is no HUD element anymore. They removed that. That was in Breath of the Wild, and they got rid of it. Okay. But if you turn it on, yeah, you can see the Shrine Sensor.

Whatever. Are you saying that the you can see the shrine sensor uh whatever are you saying that the are you saying that the pro mode is it as accessible as the regular mode uh yeah but i don't think pro like i think some people will want to play regardless of what they can experience would want to play with a more minimal hud i find the default HUD... Yeah, for sure. I find the default HUD to be not good in my opinion, design-wise. I think it's just a bit much for the rest of the game to be

as loud and obtrusive as it is. It is a lot. There's a lot on there, and there's some cruft on there. I gotta say, the sound meter on there seemed a bit much to me. I don't know if you have done enough with the ui yeah i've seen it it's like it was in the breath of the wild as well it's like it's busy

it's just like very busy i i wanted to holistically i wanted to the the thing that to me and i think it's the confluence of these new mechanics and the way that they've built the world. This game probably as much as any other game, but it's definitely up there, gives that sense of like adventure in the real, like no bullshit. There's a lot of times in this game where I felt like, there's no way i'm supposed to be doing this this this seems wrong to me this is scary like i don't exactly know where i'm going this doesn't seem like right i shouldn't be able to do this i just kind of faked my way up here with a glide i made a bonfire and then chuck chucked a pine cone in it and then glided up

really high with that. So I don't think I was supposed to be doing any of this. And somehow it just sort of gently guides you to where you're going through a lot of like expertly done like nudging. But it really feels like

and there's other factors to this like environmentally we talked about the cold. If you don't have like the full cold suit, you can still get into areas where cold is an issue, especially early on. And like finding chili peppers and making a dish that will keep you warm. it really does like feel like you have that it brings you in that way with with as much like uh flexibility as it has with like the weapons and the tools and the the the gear and items and everything like it really feels like an adventure like in the in the in the literal sense yeah no 100 it's it is kind of mind-blowing to me that they, as you said, allow for all that Buckwild stuff, but it doesn't feel like it's breaking the game in, like, janky ways. It feels like it's all very consistent.

Like, even Griffin using a shield minecart situation feels true to this game, as Buckwild's it is. Do each of you have, like, a favorite example of, like like a thing you did that you just didn't think you could pull off i mean there was a shrine puzzle that like i was completely stumped on and you tweeted this one right i yeah i did tweet it this video of it and i was like i shouldn't like i it was early it's like an early shrine puzzle i was like i feel like an idiot for not figuring this out but the solve that i came up with was just like they gave you a bunch of panels and there was one railing that you could theoretically get a ball across but how do you get a ball across a railing so i was like i think i could just stick all these panels together and i did and wisely props to the

game designers the gap that i was trying to cross was too big for all of the panels stuck end to end. It was like eight or nine panels stuck end to end. And it did not fit until I took the ball and stuck the ball at the end of the panels. And that was long enough. So I was able to run across all the panels and the ball and then try to jam the ball in the little ball cup at the end. This is before I learned you could unglue stuff, so I'm trying to jam this monstrosity

of a ball bridge into the cup. Okay, if you don't think you can unglue stuff, how did you think this game could just have a critical fail state where it's like this is the end of the game. You've glued everything together and you're not allowed to play anymore.

You glued the master sword to the ground. God damn it. Damn it. I thought there was an upgrade. I legit thought there was like a mass ultra hand upgrade that would show up and allow me to unglue stuff. That's so funny. I,

you know, I, with that same one, I did a, if I'm, if I'm thinking about the same place where there's like a sloping rail I use those panels to make a big hook

a big hook that I then attach to the ball and then just send it sliding down the rail on this big dumb hook that I fashioned out of panels yeah I've seen people make like an amazing gondola and like stuff like that for that challenge it's unreal.

And so satisfying when like even the dumbest shit you come up with works. Like that's awesome. Uh, I don't think that there's necessarily a solve for it. Maybe there is, I don't know. It seems a little bit nitpicky, but there are times when if it's,

it's the openness. If you miss something, it can really feel frustrating. Like, it can really feel – but sometimes if you miss something, I feel like you can kind of be banging your head up against. Like, for example, I mean, Russ is a specific example, but not knowing that you could unstick stuff. Oh, you know what? I will say the weapon fusion took me a long time to figure out that I needed to drop things on the ground and then attach the weapons to them. And a lot of times also the dots on the map HUD don't necessarily correspond to where you need to go next like it's not exactly where like it'll be like the quest giver instead of the actual objective for example right exactly which is weird like that's not normally how it it's not a big deal but it it is confusing if you don't know it because there's a lot of times where like i felt like

i was going the right direction but the the indicator was where I had come from. So that was a little bit disconcerting. Yeah, I've had like a side quest where it's asking me for a specific ingredient. And it doesn't sound like a complicated ingredient, but for the life of me, I haven't seen it and I have no idea where to look. And the thing that I've adopted is the game is enormous there's a ton of directions to go in when i get stuck i'm just gonna do other things until the answer reveals itself to me and that has happened probably 10 or 7 10 or 12 times over the course of this playthrough and it's satisfying because i feel like i'm still not looking anything up or asking anyone for help

or anything like just trying to like plow through it and a lot of this game feels like it reveals itself over time and so you just kind of have to be okay with it because you won't get stuck stuck for the most part you might get frustrated and have to go in a different direction but if you like make a note of it odds are you'll be able to come back. I'm a little bit stuck, stuck. Oh, are you? Currently, like that's kind of why I was being pissy when we got on the call before we started recording. I'm a little bit stuck currently and I don't really know how to get out of it. I'll have to ask you guys. Yeah, yeah, for sure.

I guess the dungeons are like, well, again, we'll go into it next week. But I guess the dungeons can be kind of linear in the way that like there's no way around them you just have to go through them right um can we sort of on that note give it some like spoiler free guidance based on our own experience of like like how to play the game recommend you no not how to play the game but like stuff that we feel strongly you should not like miss stuff that you should not skip yeah i i i have i have some stuff that's a good idea i think there there is an armor set in the game oh that you've that you find in exploring the Sky Islands that makes traversal way better

and way more enjoyable. And I won't go into it any further than that, but... How am I supposed to Google that, Griffin? I think it's something. I mean, I don't want to... We'll talk about it, I guess, more next episode. Griffin, I literally took my headphones out of my ears when you said armor set, because I don't want to fucking know.

No, I didn't say that. So I would recommend... This is also what I did with Breath of the Wild, is kind of make a beeline for the towers. Yeah, the towers are helpful. The towers are very helpful, partially because they are 95% of the time how you get up to those sky islands. But also because like if there's a point you need to get to on the map and you don't have any fast travel points close to it, you can fly there, you know, a bit easier than you can fly there.

That's also a good note to, if you see a shrine, at least go over and like activate it because then you can use it as a fast travel point from that point on and you don't have to you don't have to complete it you just have to turn it on for it to be yeah the other two things that i would say uh thing a there's like a starting area once you land i forget what it's called central town or whatever the fuck central town yeah central town and you'll get a bunch of quests in there like main quests or major quests you should do at least the first couple steps of those until they like stop giving them to you because that's how you unlock basic things like the glider and and the camera and stuff like that it's worth oh no the cameras that are too yeah the cameras oh no

the rb the camera uh so it's worth doing those you haven't even begun your you play for 25 hours you haven't begun your fucking pokemon snap journey across hyrule yet i have a glider well okay there you go uh the other tip i would say is it's you can go in any direction you really can but i think the game is gently nudging you and it is encouraged to go to the northwest which is like the rito bird town area yeah there's a few things i don't i don't want to hear what where the bird people live or their cardinal direction that they live i just took my headphones off i threw them across the room. Shut your fucking mouth, Griffin.

Just because you're a bird person, Griffin, doesn't mean we all have to obey that. There are a few larger throughout the game quests that I think start in that direction. You can do bits of them without going there, I think, but you will meet the origins of those quests.

The tiers, the giant crop circles, I think they're called geoglyphs, I think starts there. The horse ticket thing starts there. There's a whole newspaper thing that starts around there. That's a really good example of the game using being gentle but still guiding you. When I was heading in that northwest direction,

I saw a lady with a giant balloon and i was like oh shit i gotta get over there what's happening and it turned out that like it's part of the main quest they're like yeah justin's not gonna miss this we put a lady with a balloon here of course he's gonna go check it out we don't need to put an icon here uh that reminds me of we haven't even talked about the best character the entire game i don't know his name but he is very dedicated he's a hard worker and he loves his boss oh my god and all he can do is hold signs up all over the map that's a dumb can i say something that is a dumb cycle that is a dumb thing that they did i love a dumb thing. It's so dumb. Every time I see it, I'm like,

oh, these aren't fun, but I'm going to do it every fucking time. It's the same fucking thing. He pays out well. It's the easiest non-puzzle in the world. This guy's trying to hold up a sign because he loves his boss so much.

And all he does is lean a fucking plank against it. And he's like, you absolute mad lad. How did you do this? It's every time he's like, oh, damn, lean some wood against it fuck that's good anyway here's a bomb and some rice and 20 dollars and a red 20 dollars thank

you i'm going broke because i can't do simple geometry they do get a little more complicated i've seen ones where it's like on the edge of a cliff side so you can't do the basic like log on the ground thing. But yeah, I mean, I find them very satisfying even though they're stupid. Well, the most annoying thing about it is I have the ability to hold things up, right? So just let me hold it and then you nail it in place

and then I'll, give me $10. So your concern is a lore issue. It's a lore issue. His dedication to his boss though. He loves them. Is really is really this talk to everyone talk to everyone partially because this game is it has a lot of very good characters like addison in it uh but also because it does a great job of kind of signposting shit that you might want to check out on the other end of the map i i think if you don't go in the direction the game kind of intends you to go in anytime you stop at a stable you can talk

to people and say like hey what's up and be like oh there's this lady with a balloon yeah in the northwest you gotta check her shit out um it is worth really good job also with vignetting um the like ancillary characters uh i think there's a lot of it's not just zelda it's almost any open world rpg you walk into a town and it's just like filled to the brim with these dolts just like raking their lawns for their entire existence right it's like well i really wish the king would be whatever there's really nice little like vignettes when you talk to someone um there was one where it was like at a stable and there was a woman from the rito village who uh well i mean like a bird

woman for the rito village who was talking about how hard it was there and how the the storms were terrible and she was getting some supplies from the guy and it really like it advanced something right it wasn't cruft it was oh, there's a little bit of story you're getting here and not just like some rando shouting at you for no reason. And they also write anything important in red, which is helpful. Yeah, just scanning it.

They'll say like, oh, the giant footsteps. And then you're like, oh, I guess there's giant footsteps around here. Good to know. It is worth keeping a notepad though because although major side quests do uh get logged and like with the details and stuff like that they you will learn a lot of stuff just in talking to people and it will not get saved anywhere so if you need to like just remember oh hey there's like a horse northwest of here that you should check out

it's worth just keeping a notepad on the side or on your phone or whatever i'm really do you guys are you all struggling at all with i'm somebody who like if i'm playing dark souls i want to find like where's the item that you can get pretty early on to like the best sword the best armor the best this the best that yeah and go chasing after that do you guys have to fight that impulse at all with this? Because it's a bit of a struggle for me. I made that mistake very early on just because this game is all over my TikTok feed. It is like basically my entire algorithm now.

And there are so many videos that are like, get this blank suit because it has this blank, blank buff that is going to make your life so much easier and it's so easy to get and then you'll watch it and it's like no that would take me five hours to get what are you talking about like that would be me looking at a guide or like taking all these steps and not really enjoying the game as i want to it would just be me chasing one cool buff which yeah technically yeah, technically I could do, effectively speedrun it,

but then it just becomes work. Yeah, you don't want to do that, folks, because you are constantly getting a little bit stronger when you play just sort of, from a statistical standpoint, like you'll find better bases for weapons and find tougher monsters with better upgrade parts um but the information sort of gathering of this game is is really is really

really good um the first time you find a like like in a cave and i was like oh fuck like like i'm not trying to get my shield eaten over here. And I tried something with an item, and it worked very good. He will eat other stuff than just shields. And once I started goofing around with that, I started having a lot of fun exploring the caves. And that kind of like, learning enemies' weaknesses

and how to best approach each kind of combat encounter is really something I think you will ruin learning enemies weaknesses and how to best approach each kind of combat encounter is, is, is really something I think you will ruin if you just come at it with a, you know, end game sword. Yeah. And it's also in the,

it's all in the game. That's what I've come to realize is like, they are not, there's not, you know, like you don't have to read it in the novels to get this. Yeah. Something like that. Like you, you know like you don't have to read it in the novels to get this yeah or something like that like you you know i think there are a lot of games out there that really require you to follow a guide

or whatever it is to even have a shot and this game it does not require that and not only that like there was a there was a chest that i found early on i was like man if i didn't find this chest this would have been like a real blow to me. Cause I never would have come back to the space ever again. And then I was just walking around and this random like person on the road talked to me and was like, Hey, by the way,

here are some more armor pieces you can find. And like marked my map for me. So they, the game is actually very generous with information. So long as you're patient enough to just like, wait for it to come to you rather than yeah just speed running to the like whatever best um gear i i will also say and we're going to talk about stuff post first dungeon next week uh there is some considerable stuff that is that is unlocked uh once or or becomes available to kind of mess around with like systems that you do not have access until you beat that first dungeon. So I would also, as long as we're suggesting things, I would actually recommend you don't get stuck forever before doing the first dungeon.

Are we saying we're going to do the Northwest dungeon? That is the one I did, yes. Okay. So let's all assume that's the dungeon we're gonna do the northwest dungeon that is what the one i did yes okay so let's let's all assume that's the dungeon we're gonna cover if you're but no i think it's once you have beaten one dungeon i'm not specifically saying i'm gonna do that one too i actually i just mean from a talking about it standpoint yeah sure yeah y'all talk about this game being uh super open i effectively beat there's a long long long path to the wind dungeon and into it and i just did all of it without knowing that that was like a game quest because you can just do it without triggering it oh really and i got in i got into the wind dungeon and then i was like

whoa this place makes no sense and all the things that like i think should be like actionable are not working for me that is and then i looked it up and it was like yeah you why are you not here with blank and i was like that's nuts i have never met this dude um how did you do that how did you do that people asking me that and it was it felt like i was like seeing the matrix that's amazing like that's really the person you're talking about is quite a big help yeah yeah man it was it was super fun but it was you're you're it sounds like you're saying you beat donkey kong without mario no i was like i was using so many you like zonai devices to get every i was i was like this game kicks fucking ass, man.

We have not just sort of showered the game just blindly with praise this episode because God knows it's gotten plenty of that. But man alive, it's fucking incredible. Anytime I talk to anybody, there's a dad at Henry's school that I talk to about games sometimes. We saw each other at pickup today. Just like, holy shit, shit man like it is of a

quality level that is genuinely unfathomable uh it is one of the most wildly well-designed things i've i've maybe ever played it's just it's like pure unadulterated confidence like they were like yeah we're gonna let people do whatever the fuck they want and it's gonna be fine because we're the best goddamn game designers on the planet yeah that is why the whole experience feels like that i think it's it might be the best game ever made because what they and they had a very important epiphany and it come jesus moment they said we made a pretty okay game with breath of the wild but there are better games out there gravity rush death strands what if we learned from the best and you know ate the humble pie and and they did this they it is breath of the wild meets the two best games ever and now

i think it might have surpassed them it does kind of feel like zelda was like rooting through the attic after Death Stranding died. That's like... Hey, this is a pretty good idea. Hey, y'all, look at this. I know everything around here is just a bunch of used diapers and people magazines, but what about this one thing?

Behind this five hour clip of Guillermo del Toro talking about the meaning of life there's some pretty cool stuff there's this weird car here what do we do with this there's a character here named Gun Cool Man do we want him yeah

Zelda is anybody playing anything else no I'd be impressed actually if someone else Is anybody playing anything else? No. I mean, I don't. I'd be impressed, actually, if someone else. I have, actually. Wow.

Before it came out, Henry and I had kind of been playing Pokemon Violet off and on. But then I installed Pokemon Scarlet on my Switch so we could do the multiplayer together. And it's really great. That game still makes me so mad uh it says it run okay now no uh i think it runs a little bit better but it is not good yeah it is it is staggeringly bad compared to breath or uh the tears of the kingdom uh the fact that they run on the same generation of gaming hardware is buck wild. But yeah, with a kiddo who just wants to run around and make his Lucario fight a bunch of baby Pokemon so he can get his level as high as he can, it's fun to play multiplayer with that particular energy in that game.

So we've actually been doing that a little bit. Yeah, that's sick. I have not been playing anything else. I wanted to just very briefly highlight a neat thing. I think that if it's called foul play, and I will say that Travis, our middle brother, was in one of these things to give you that context up front, which is how I found out about it. that context up front which is how i found out about it but it is a um a mystery where you're watching it in a streaming format right you're watching it online um and it is a multi-camera movie each episode is 90 minutes long and you are switching between different points of view um within the setting and there there are scenes happening concurrently that can provide context as to what happened in the mystery.

The thing that's kind of interesting about it is that all the casts are really deeply stacked with improv comedians. So the scripts and what have you are actually being improvised as they're doing the scenes. So there's like some hard clue type stuff. And then there's just some like genuinely funny like vignettes that break out.

And it's really something where you're encouraged to like just kind of watch whatever scenes entertain you, whatever you think is funny. And the mystery is almost a little bit secondary to it, but it's a really interesting way of like watching something um travis was in one called the the dark curse of savion sun guard which is like a fantasy one but the first episode is more of like a classic uh cozy mystery there's a reality show themed one a noir one um they've been rolling out a new case every week. It's at foulplay.live. I think you can pay

per episode, or you can buy all of them. I think each one is like $10, or you can buy them all, five of them for $40. And it's VOD. You can watch over and over again. But they do do a live premiere

where you can chat on discord in the first like 20 people to solve it or whatever win something but that's really neat um so what game are we talking about next week we've got gears of the kingdom part two coming at you it's like we're doing zen pinball garfield table next week i can't wait everybody everybody. For people, I'm sure some people out there are like, you know what? I don't want to do Zelda all over again. I need a break. Here's the good news. After this, we've got Street Fighter,

also that. We've got Street Fighter, we've got Diablo, we've got Final Fantasy. We've got a lot of stuff coming. Christ. Hey, Griffin, all of everything I just said is in the next five weeks and also a surprise release of fable i guess it is happening folks just trust me i got sources um and then four episodes on red fall and that'll take us to december um thank you so much

for listening uh we really appreciate your your continued patronage. Speaking of that, I wanted to thank the following people for writing reviews of the besties on Apple Podcasts. We have J.R. Frickin' Fight, Bjork Tribe, and Chag Rock. Thank you for writing reviews for the besties on Apple Podcasts. Thank you to everyone else who has written reviews, talked about the show, or shared the show, or shared your love of Tears of the Kingdom with us. We appreciate you. That is going to do it for us uh until next time my name is justin mcelroy and for all these cool

dudes thanks for listening to the besties because oh and be sure to join us again next week for the besties because shouldn't the world's best friends pick the world's best games. Besties!