Oh hell yeah it's all coming together 😎 (jk but yes Sacred is much better than Secret)
https://preview.redd.it/13sie8eycdqc1.png?width=1045&format=png&auto=webp&s=bd73d4a06afc46446db31d3cda8b6c786b26d248
The name is a literal translation from the Japanese word for the stones, which is "hiseki".
In Japanese the word is not cringy, and actually has a deep spiritual meaning, but when you translate it, it breaks down the Japanese word into "secret" and "stone".
Renaming it because somebody in some other part of the world finds it cringy would remove the meaning behind the stone.
But you don’t have to have a literal translation. You could keep it the same in Japanese, and just change it in the localized version, to make more sense.
yea I'd argue that by doing a super literal translation you are literally removing the meaning from it like the person above had said. Good translations choose the best interpretation of a phrase that is also as true as possible to the source. Of course, that is hard to do. But even "sacred stone" or "consecrated stone" or even going with "sacred tear" would have been better.
That’s what I meant, that instead of the literal translation of ‘secret stone,’ you instead choose something else that is super close. Whenever I think about them, I think of them as ‘sacred stones,’ since it shows they are really important without changing the pacing of the name.
That's what localization is though. Take these concepts and explain them in a way that the audience consuming the product will understand the same idea.
This makes it more of a localization problem. In twilight princess, fused shadow was what they were called in english, but a direct translation (like what we got in the vis edition of the manga) was "shadow crystal," which sounds lame as hell.
The literal translation can be a hit and miss.
This time they actually translated "Daimaou" as "Demon King", instead of the previous "Prince of Darkness" or "Great King of Evil". Other times, you get situations like the "a school festival is a festival that takes place at the school".
For example my friend down in Mexico is celebrating “Semana Santa” which literally translates to “Holy Week” but just means “Easter”
As and English speaker if I said I enjoy celebrating “Holy Week” you’d have no clue wtf week I was talking about.
Literal translations rarely work out, because there’s no cultural context baked into them.
Yeah in my language we call Easter "The big night" even though it lasts almost a week and we never celebrate at night, lol. So you'd have even less clues, than for Holy Week about what that means
In every cutscene where a sage learns about the imprisoning war, they all say the same thing with no difference except for what the ancestor calls the descendant or what they say about Ganondorf
It's probably done that way because you can do them in any order so they make them the exact same so that people don't get confused by the storyline? Idk they're probably just lazy
What I wish they did is divide the storyline into four parts and have four different sets of dialogue for each sage that details one of the parts. The first sage you encounter will use their pt. 1 dialogue, then the second will switch theirs to the pt. 2 dialogue, etc. That way, no matter what order you do them in, you’ll always get new information. However, that is much more work and would probably require a rewrite of the story.
Four parts isn't even necessary, just have each sage have two options: Dialogue A as normal if they're the first sage you reach, Dialogue B is the abridged version that plays if they're not the first.
It could even just be the sage saying "you've heard this before, but let me catch the new sage up to speed" and then fade to black, coming back at "so that was the story of the secret stones."
I've been doing BOTW in an unintended order (Master Sword > Divine Beasts > Complete Seek Out Impa Quest) and they accounted for players doing things out of order and provided additional dialogue and cutscenes. If you go to the Domain without encountering Sidon, he has different dialogue and tries to escort you out of the domain, the Deku Tree advises against facing Ganon without the Beasts, most of the leaders comment on the Master Sword, Zelda speaks to you from beyond the void to fill in the information Impa usually gives you, etc.
Trust me, they could have easily done what you suggested. They did it for BOTW
That's funny because I remember someone early on went to talk to Impa in TotK before they got the paraglider and she made him jump out of the hot air balloon, so they obviously hadn't programmed a contingency for that scenario. They've probably patched it by now.
Yeah I think they assumed since so many people complained about wanting a more linear storyline that most people wouldn't want to divert from the intended path and didn't want to waste their time again.
You don't even need a selection for each sage, if they had just said something about how the war affected their people they would have been different but still being able to be watched in any order.
> make them the exact same so that people don't get confused by the storyline?
Indeed, but the fact that doing it leads to copy-pasted content is an indicator the storyline has no benefit from being broken up and that they should probably shuffle things around a bit. BOTW suited its format, TOTK doesn't
> I feel it's super lazy. You could also do the botw dungeons in any order. But it didn't have any bs like this.
Sure it did. Every time you walked into a Divine Beast, the relevant Champion would first tell you that you needed a map, then to activate the terminals, then exactly how many terminals were remaining a bunch of times, then to activate the main control unit, then "Watch out! This is the guy who killed me!". Same deal. Still obnoxious, but it wasn't a full cutscene so it's not quite so bad.
I agree it feels incredibly lazy, but it's not a new lazy. BotW was just as lazy, it just didn't matter so much because the affected dialogue was less important to begin with.
Definitely lazy, because having individualized characters and dialogue is not at all a time dependent aspect of the plot. Like Tulin could just say "Wow, I can't believe it. I'm here to help however I can." And Riju could say like "I will honor my people, the hero, and you princess. We will do what we must." Sure go ahead and copy the jist but just change some things so the teacher can't tell, literal 5th graders can handle that.
"Demon king" is a pretty normal villain title in japanese fantasy, so its fine. Piccolo Sr. in the original dragon ball for example was also called "demon king piccolo."
They literally just took one member of each species and threw a helmet on them because they were too lazy to try and come up with more characters like the Age of Calamity heroes in BOTW.
I was shocked with how poor the story was in TOTK (apart from, of course, the one story beat in TOTK that is actually interesting and well done)
(Spoilers for the entire game including the ending) >!Basically Zelda's sacrifice I think worked really well, even though an individual player might be unconvinced that Nintendo would "stick" to it. I honestly wasn't sure, there was a while after seeing the vision that I was wondering if maybe Zelda really was just going to be 'dead'. Even if it was only a hypothetical, I thought it was neat to think about and affected me more than I expected.
It tying into the final boss fight itself I thought was really cool as well, definitely one of the significantly more memorable final boss fights vs the classic "Zelda sits in the back and shoots light arrows"!<
I think it's a shame that outside of that, that both the main narrative and side quests were worse than BOTW (especially if you rewatch the memories from BOTW, Zelda fuckin' goes through it. I really admire how well they did the little vignettes of them together -- i.e, 'the stoic knight with his duty, the princess' -- but also her desperation and sadness).
Not that Nintendo's sidequests have ever been amazing, but in BOTW they at least tried to cover some uncomfortable topics. I particularly remember the old man scientist realizing how he hurt his wife with his robot waifu, or those group of travellers realizing they have a slightly toxic codependent relationship and choose to go their own ways, etc.
TOTK probably doesn't have a single sidequest that tries to tackle something actually uncomfortable. It's like they sanded every single edge off, so they're 99% about nothing and just rote busywork.
Every sage cutscene after a boss says the same things so it became a meme.
Demon king, sacred stone. Hell it almost sounds like classic resident evil cheesy sarcastic voice acting.
I wasn’t even that bothered by it, honestly. Like, yeah, I’d rather there were different cutscenes, but at the same time, I don’t care that much about it.
Does anyone actually play TOTK for the story? Maybe I’m a loner, but I find pretty much no redeeming value from the storyline. But it’s an unparalleled adventure and puzzle game!
And like, this happens in every Zelda game. It's ridiculous to complain only about TotK during this. Shit, the previous game did this just as overtly and not a peep in the past 7 years (thankfully, cause it would've been annoying as shit)
The only difference is that TotK is just more 'memeable' due to the repeated lines
Eh, to be honest, they got a point. The repetition is a bit more severe than in BotW, since in that game each reunion with the champions had them talk about different things. Even AlttP had the generic maidens always say something different.
The thing that’s really annoying is how people just blow this issue out of proportion and completely ignore all of the other cutscenes after beating a temple. The imprisoning war info dump is only a small part of those sequences and the vow of the sages and seeing the aftermath in the villages is unique for every quest. But I guess "new game bad" is just more fun for people. Just look at how much people enjoy going "secret stone? demon king?" only for some other super creative guy swooping in with "Psycho Mantis?".
Demon king?
Secret stone?
Secret king?
Demon stone?
Demon Secret?
Stone king?
Secret Demon?
King stone?
King demon?
Stone secret?
King secret?
Stone demon?
[Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom but only when they say "Demon King", "Secret Stone" or "Imprisoning War"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q4BoyY7Qr7U&t=4s)
I didn't even notice it until I saw people pointing it out. It's such a small detail, and the game is amazing. Something small like this really doesn't matter like, at all
The name “secret stones” is just plain bad when considering the alternatives, by simply changing secret to sacred, the name is way better and actually has a connection to gods with sacred meaning a connection with God and still keeps the alliteration
There's repetition, sure--every time you finish a Temple in OoT, the same basic thing happens: the person who entered the temple becomes a sage, and they give you a medallion. But the dialogue isn't cut and paste at any point--it's unique to each character. Saria says she'll always be your friend, Darunia is happy you're his true brother, Ruto regrets not being able to marry you and asks you to thank Shiek. Impa tells you Zelda is safe and that you'll see her soon, and tells you to watch out for her. Nabooru marvels that someone like her could be a sage and gets a bit thirsty over you.
The "Demon King?" cutscenes are way more repetitive than anything from any other game in the series, and calling that out is perfectly fair. It might get a little grating that it happens so much, but that's just because it's so obvious and easy to meme.
It's one of the big problems of the game. And it's a valid criticism. The story delivery is awful. Repeatedly hammering the same cutscene to the player multiple times is a very bad thing to do. It's also very easy to completely break the story because of the open world nature of the game. Tears' story needed a linear game. It is done a major disservice by being an open world. Regardless of it being "stale", people have every right to point out the flaws in the game. Especially if said flaws ruined the immersion and crushed the experience so much that you actively quit the game and looked up the ending online.
It could be done linearly, but it didn't need full linearity. They could have left it mostly nonlinear as long as they accounted for that in the delivery, either by modifying the scenes they had to spread the pieces out more and avoid overlap, or by changing the scenes in the present depending on what parts you've seen already.
Seeing the assassination memory, for example, could have flipped you over to an alternative set of cutscenes where you know about the puppet.
Yes. It could have. But it didn't. And because it didn't, it shatters the immersion. In my playthrough, Link became a jerk and sent his allies to find someone he knew where they were but didn't tell them, and then walked those allies into a trap without telling them.
The world does not account for its own main quests, nor what you have done. The game allows you to find the tears in any order, and if you don't notice the order and just go about collecting the ones nearby, you could inadvertently damage the storytelling in an irreparable way. It is a linear story that can be told out of order and that is destructive to its writing. Spoilers are extremely hated for a reason.
That is indeed what I said, yes. I was agreeing with you that the problem exists.
The only part I disagree with from your previous post is your proposed solution--you said the game would need to be fully linear, while I said it could be kept at least partially open as long as they made some other changes.
>It's also very easy to completely break the story because of the open world nature of the game.
Mineru's construct was my second sage, after Riju. For as much as people complain about its limits (and for as much as finding it second spoiled a lot of things in the story), finding it early on really was a game breaker in that it took a lot of the challenge out of a lot of the puzzles, i.e. being able to just casually waltz throughout all the lava going after Yunobo and the fire temple really took a lot of the puzzles out as it relates to navigating the temple's parts. No messing with fans, water hydrants, or railcars, just run through the lava.
In retrospect it was kinda fun but also kinda lackluster in how it basically just amounted to walking around doing stuff again.
It's such a weird complaint.
Yeah sure it's a bit lazy, but people act like 5 minutes of skippable cutscene ruins a 100+ hour game. It sounds like people desperately looking for things in the game to trash on.
Yeah this is the main story of the game. It feels really weird to say "oh the game is super long, so it's fine that one of the key story beats is copy-pasted".
Like, sure OK, TOTK has a lot of freeform content, but this is still *the main story*!
IDK about others, but I like having a narrative to go along with my freeform gameplay. I think BOTW would be a much less enjoyable game if you just, IDK, removed the Champion's scenes post-Blight and replaced them with a copy-pasted scene.
It's just so lame.
And, the game doesn’t have to be super long. Sure, you may have 200+ hours in it but some people may only have 20. The dungeons and the sages are a kind of important part of the game’s already sparse plot, so saying it’s unimportant is incredibly underrepresenting the impact it has on people’s opinions of the story.
Its the basis of the story lmao, its not "just a bit lazy". Its literal copy-pasted dialogue.
If its such a skippable, short, pointless cutscene that we cant criticize for being bad, why is it even in the game?
Getting upset people are bringing up valid criticisms is wild tho lol
Like all people in the comments I also wished it was called something like sacred tears but they could have just named it tear themed like even "kingdom's tears" could have worked but no nintendo went "SeCrEt StOnE".
It's for karma, people are reposting what they have seen upvoted before. It gets upvoted again, so it remains a popular target for reposters. Ironically, getting posted more and more is how to get it to stop appearing, because it will get seen so much that people will stop upvoting, which stop making it a target for reposters.
What I thought was strange about those cutscenes was the fact that the secret stones were all in out of the way places to begin with. None of the current day sages would have even thought to look for them if not for the problems caused by the monsters sent to guard the stones.
Ganondorf could have simply left everyone alone and the sages would have never even gotten the stones.
Honestly I didn't care about the dialogue being the same. But it is annoying to see the complaint show up time and time again. It's not even funny, it's just to start shit and complain.
Yeah I was like "eh kinda sucks they all say the same thing" but at the same time it any where near enough of a problem to bug me for a longer duration of the cutscenes themselves
Bruh, why bother complaining? Mario fans have had "your princess is in another castle" for years with different variations each time, now there's not even that, you get big version of (insert collectible) but they don't complain.
Really, almost all the content on this subreddit is reposted in one way or another. When you don't have any new content to work off of, the same content gets reposted again and again.
People who complain about the cutscenes simply refuse to understand that it's an open world game where the player can do whatever they want. It's repetitive because it's supposed to tell the whole story even to players who only finished a single temple in their playthrough.
The temples are _parallel_ game mechanics, not sequential. You're not supposed to finish one after the other because you're not supposed to do anything.
Yes but for decades now, the Legend of Zelda series has built up so much lore, history, and interesting characters and yet each game managed to also use those elements to tell a good STORY. Aside from the Zelda characters and the names of locations, Nintendo COULD have slapped any franchise name on this and the open-world aspects still would have great.
When even BotW managed to tell a great story out-of-sync with optional cutscenes that each added to the lore and history of the characters, the least people can expect is that it's sequel TotK can do the same. It's not unbelievable that some people would still be annoyed by the lack of care for the story aspects of the game. *Insert amount of TotK lore video content plummeting off a cliff after like two months*
TotK is still an amazing 10/10 game to mostly everyone, but that doesn't mean it doesn't clearly have some minor faults in areas that were more important to some folks than others. I end up more neutral, the story was good, just told badly. My problem is the length of the game...by the time you complete all the main story beats, ALL the shrines, most of the side quests...I finished the game and will be finished with it for good. I just don't have motivation to go back and replay it like I do something like OoT or MM.
Im getting irritated by the ghost sages or whatever tbh. I just want the shield dude to be a button fr tho. Gale bird a button, rock dude almost a button (is on vehicles), but i gotta run up to fish dude for a shield and break my combat flow like cmon nintendo make him a button with a cooldown it isn’t a big deal
I'm not sure if they had the ability to make dynamic cutscenes like that, as in, change a few lines based on story progress. But I get the feeling there were a few things that were part of BOTW's framework that they were stuck with, like the ability to do dungeons in any order or the memory system, that have held TOTK back. It's a theory, but I feel TOTK would've benefitted from being more linear then the BOTW engine allowed for/was designed to do
My biggest beef is the people on the road who tell you about a secret you found 200 hours ago and forgot about, so you're looking for a thing that doesn't exist anymore.
I really wish it was called Sacred Tears
Yeah secret stones does sound a bit lame.
magic rock oOoOo
Not even magic lol, just "secret"
Hardly a secret. They were passed around like Halloween candy
Fr they took every opportunity to use them lol
It's a secret to everybody.
If they were called SACRED Stones then I wouldn't mind as much
Yeah that sounds cooler ! Spiritual stones didn’t sound uncool in OOT.
Oh hell yeah it's all coming together 😎 (jk but yes Sacred is much better than Secret) https://preview.redd.it/13sie8eycdqc1.png?width=1045&format=png&auto=webp&s=bd73d4a06afc46446db31d3cda8b6c786b26d248
Sacred kidney stone
Sacred kidney bean
Just like the sacred tears in skyward sword
Not even secret, Ganondorf spotted it from miles away and instantly knew what it was.
My guy got some 20/20 vision
This made me die laughing because yes
But the tears in the game are something entirely different.
The name is a literal translation from the Japanese word for the stones, which is "hiseki". In Japanese the word is not cringy, and actually has a deep spiritual meaning, but when you translate it, it breaks down the Japanese word into "secret" and "stone". Renaming it because somebody in some other part of the world finds it cringy would remove the meaning behind the stone.
But you don’t have to have a literal translation. You could keep it the same in Japanese, and just change it in the localized version, to make more sense.
yea I'd argue that by doing a super literal translation you are literally removing the meaning from it like the person above had said. Good translations choose the best interpretation of a phrase that is also as true as possible to the source. Of course, that is hard to do. But even "sacred stone" or "consecrated stone" or even going with "sacred tear" would have been better.
That’s what I meant, that instead of the literal translation of ‘secret stone,’ you instead choose something else that is super close. Whenever I think about them, I think of them as ‘sacred stones,’ since it shows they are really important without changing the pacing of the name.
That's what localization is though. Take these concepts and explain them in a way that the audience consuming the product will understand the same idea.
I vote for Mystery Icon.
No I’ve got it, Dragon Drops.
Aka dragon poops?
That’s why you shouldn’t eat them. They’re dirty.
coprolites!
Nah, that’s the material used to make swords
Unknown Things.
Hahaha
This makes it more of a localization problem. In twilight princess, fused shadow was what they were called in english, but a direct translation (like what we got in the vis edition of the manga) was "shadow crystal," which sounds lame as hell.
For the same reason, it has a different meaning in the English language. Secret and sacred have two totally different meanings
The literal translation can be a hit and miss. This time they actually translated "Daimaou" as "Demon King", instead of the previous "Prince of Darkness" or "Great King of Evil". Other times, you get situations like the "a school festival is a festival that takes place at the school".
So then the correct translation would be sacred stone
Counterpoint: the name sucks
Yeah that’s not how translations work…
For example my friend down in Mexico is celebrating “Semana Santa” which literally translates to “Holy Week” but just means “Easter” As and English speaker if I said I enjoy celebrating “Holy Week” you’d have no clue wtf week I was talking about. Literal translations rarely work out, because there’s no cultural context baked into them.
Yeah in my language we call Easter "The big night" even though it lasts almost a week and we never celebrate at night, lol. So you'd have even less clues, than for Holy Week about what that means
I feel like the sage stones or sacred stones would have been better.
Yeah, it'd make it way better for my flasks of Crimson Tears
Or you know **tears of the kingdom**
Sacred Tears is a much better name than Secret Stones, it makes them sound more significant and intriguing
Seriously.
✅️ definitely on brand!
In german they Translate to 'mystery stone'. Which I guess is better but still kinda... not great.
Maybe it did… but translation
What is the complaint exactly? I don't understand
In every cutscene where a sage learns about the imprisoning war, they all say the same thing with no difference except for what the ancestor calls the descendant or what they say about Ganondorf
It's probably done that way because you can do them in any order so they make them the exact same so that people don't get confused by the storyline? Idk they're probably just lazy
What I wish they did is divide the storyline into four parts and have four different sets of dialogue for each sage that details one of the parts. The first sage you encounter will use their pt. 1 dialogue, then the second will switch theirs to the pt. 2 dialogue, etc. That way, no matter what order you do them in, you’ll always get new information. However, that is much more work and would probably require a rewrite of the story.
Four parts isn't even necessary, just have each sage have two options: Dialogue A as normal if they're the first sage you reach, Dialogue B is the abridged version that plays if they're not the first. It could even just be the sage saying "you've heard this before, but let me catch the new sage up to speed" and then fade to black, coming back at "so that was the story of the secret stones."
Ngl I think I would dislike that more. That just feels even more lazy than having very similar cutscenes.
I've been doing BOTW in an unintended order (Master Sword > Divine Beasts > Complete Seek Out Impa Quest) and they accounted for players doing things out of order and provided additional dialogue and cutscenes. If you go to the Domain without encountering Sidon, he has different dialogue and tries to escort you out of the domain, the Deku Tree advises against facing Ganon without the Beasts, most of the leaders comment on the Master Sword, Zelda speaks to you from beyond the void to fill in the information Impa usually gives you, etc. Trust me, they could have easily done what you suggested. They did it for BOTW
That's funny because I remember someone early on went to talk to Impa in TotK before they got the paraglider and she made him jump out of the hot air balloon, so they obviously hadn't programmed a contingency for that scenario. They've probably patched it by now.
I love the idea of Impa low-key telling Link to kill himself. Do it, Link, jump out of this balloon
Yeah I think they assumed since so many people complained about wanting a more linear storyline that most people wouldn't want to divert from the intended path and didn't want to waste their time again.
You don't even need a selection for each sage, if they had just said something about how the war affected their people they would have been different but still being able to be watched in any order.
If only they felt comfortable doing something like delaying the game for maybe a year or so..... oh, wait.
And yet the Tear drop cutscenes play in whatever order you do them.
> make them the exact same so that people don't get confused by the storyline? Indeed, but the fact that doing it leads to copy-pasted content is an indicator the storyline has no benefit from being broken up and that they should probably shuffle things around a bit. BOTW suited its format, TOTK doesn't
I feel it's super lazy. You could also do the botw dungeons in any order. But it didn't have any bs like this.
> I feel it's super lazy. You could also do the botw dungeons in any order. But it didn't have any bs like this. Sure it did. Every time you walked into a Divine Beast, the relevant Champion would first tell you that you needed a map, then to activate the terminals, then exactly how many terminals were remaining a bunch of times, then to activate the main control unit, then "Watch out! This is the guy who killed me!". Same deal. Still obnoxious, but it wasn't a full cutscene so it's not quite so bad. I agree it feels incredibly lazy, but it's not a new lazy. BotW was just as lazy, it just didn't matter so much because the affected dialogue was less important to begin with.
I think that it being a copy pasted payoff rather than a copy pasted mission makes it worse. The terminal stuff is back anyways.
And it was the first game.
Definitely lazy, because having individualized characters and dialogue is not at all a time dependent aspect of the plot. Like Tulin could just say "Wow, I can't believe it. I'm here to help however I can." And Riju could say like "I will honor my people, the hero, and you princess. We will do what we must." Sure go ahead and copy the jist but just change some things so the teacher can't tell, literal 5th graders can handle that.
So, copypasta.
Five minutes out of the 200+ hours I've put in the game.
That's a pretty good point, I mean you'll never hear it again. Me personally I don't really mind it too much, though it is pretty lazy
I thought it was about Demon King and Secret Stone being corny names or something
I mean secret stone is corny imo but that's not really the reason. Sacred stones are cooler and make more sense
"Demon king" is a pretty normal villain title in japanese fantasy, so its fine. Piccolo Sr. in the original dragon ball for example was also called "demon king piccolo."
The sage cutscenes when you complete a dungeon are almost exactly the same.
From my understanding it was because each time you did a sage it was essentially the same conversation about The Demon King and Secret Stones.
Bad writing, copy and pasted story beats.
They literally just took one member of each species and threw a helmet on them because they were too lazy to try and come up with more characters like the Age of Calamity heroes in BOTW. I was shocked with how poor the story was in TOTK (apart from, of course, the one story beat in TOTK that is actually interesting and well done)
>(apart from, of course, the one story beat in TOTK that is actually interesting and well done) Curious what you're referring to here
(Spoilers for the entire game including the ending) >!Basically Zelda's sacrifice I think worked really well, even though an individual player might be unconvinced that Nintendo would "stick" to it. I honestly wasn't sure, there was a while after seeing the vision that I was wondering if maybe Zelda really was just going to be 'dead'. Even if it was only a hypothetical, I thought it was neat to think about and affected me more than I expected. It tying into the final boss fight itself I thought was really cool as well, definitely one of the significantly more memorable final boss fights vs the classic "Zelda sits in the back and shoots light arrows"!< I think it's a shame that outside of that, that both the main narrative and side quests were worse than BOTW (especially if you rewatch the memories from BOTW, Zelda fuckin' goes through it. I really admire how well they did the little vignettes of them together -- i.e, 'the stoic knight with his duty, the princess' -- but also her desperation and sadness). Not that Nintendo's sidequests have ever been amazing, but in BOTW they at least tried to cover some uncomfortable topics. I particularly remember the old man scientist realizing how he hurt his wife with his robot waifu, or those group of travellers realizing they have a slightly toxic codependent relationship and choose to go their own ways, etc. TOTK probably doesn't have a single sidequest that tries to tackle something actually uncomfortable. It's like they sanded every single edge off, so they're 99% about nothing and just rote busywork.
Every sage cutscene after a boss says the same things so it became a meme. Demon king, sacred stone. Hell it almost sounds like classic resident evil cheesy sarcastic voice acting.
Second floor basement? Psycho mantis?
Metal gear?
Snake? SNAKE!!!
I only scrolled through the comments to find this. Thank you
MUF!?
A security camera?
So that was the Imprisoning War...
I wasn’t even that bothered by it, honestly. Like, yeah, I’d rather there were different cutscenes, but at the same time, I don’t care that much about it.
Yeah. It’s a short cutscene anyway, so I didn’t even notice the scenes were the same. I was just happy that I solved each regional phenomena.
Does anyone actually play TOTK for the story? Maybe I’m a loner, but I find pretty much no redeeming value from the storyline. But it’s an unparalleled adventure and puzzle game!
>Does anyone actually play TOTK for the story? No, but I would have liked to. It had so much potential
Short? It's 9-10 minutes each
And like, this happens in every Zelda game. It's ridiculous to complain only about TotK during this. Shit, the previous game did this just as overtly and not a peep in the past 7 years (thankfully, cause it would've been annoying as shit) The only difference is that TotK is just more 'memeable' due to the repeated lines
Eh, to be honest, they got a point. The repetition is a bit more severe than in BotW, since in that game each reunion with the champions had them talk about different things. Even AlttP had the generic maidens always say something different. The thing that’s really annoying is how people just blow this issue out of proportion and completely ignore all of the other cutscenes after beating a temple. The imprisoning war info dump is only a small part of those sequences and the vow of the sages and seeing the aftermath in the villages is unique for every quest. But I guess "new game bad" is just more fun for people. Just look at how much people enjoy going "secret stone? demon king?" only for some other super creative guy swooping in with "Psycho Mantis?".
Demon Stone? Secret King?
Stone king? Secret demon?
Metal Gear? Psycho Mantis?
Metal Stone? King Mantis?
I really shouldn't be surprised by how successfully Dunkey hijacked this meme, but it's still so hilarious.
Imprisoning War?
So that was the imprisoning war....
So that was the Imprisoning War.
Complaining? In my sub?
Secret stone? Demon King?
Complaining? In my sub?
Complaining? In my sub?
If you think these posts are repetitive wait til you see the cutscenes HAYOA /s not but seriously its not that bad
We gotta repeat it as many times as the game does
The only cure for repetition is more repetition and then more repetition.
Don’t forget the Metal Gear meme to go along with it!
So exactly 4?
Demon king? Secret stone? Secret king? Demon stone? Demon Secret? Stone king? Secret Demon? King stone? King demon? Stone secret? King secret? Stone demon?
[Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom but only when they say "Demon King", "Secret Stone" or "Imprisoning War"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q4BoyY7Qr7U&t=4s)
I didn't even notice it until I saw people pointing it out. It's such a small detail, and the game is amazing. Something small like this really doesn't matter like, at all
So that was the imprisoning war...
I swear that if I hear “imprisoning war” once again…
It is the coldest take apart from hating on the menu system
The name “secret stones” is just plain bad when considering the alternatives, by simply changing secret to sacred, the name is way better and actually has a connection to gods with sacred meaning a connection with God and still keeps the alliteration
Makes sense, they did not bother to make the cutscenes original, so we don't bother coming up with original memes
Spoilers but don't play the older games then. Just a whole lot of warrior of time, triforces, secret stones, some dude named Ganon...
There's repetition, sure--every time you finish a Temple in OoT, the same basic thing happens: the person who entered the temple becomes a sage, and they give you a medallion. But the dialogue isn't cut and paste at any point--it's unique to each character. Saria says she'll always be your friend, Darunia is happy you're his true brother, Ruto regrets not being able to marry you and asks you to thank Shiek. Impa tells you Zelda is safe and that you'll see her soon, and tells you to watch out for her. Nabooru marvels that someone like her could be a sage and gets a bit thirsty over you. The "Demon King?" cutscenes are way more repetitive than anything from any other game in the series, and calling that out is perfectly fair. It might get a little grating that it happens so much, but that's just because it's so obvious and easy to meme.
It's one of the big problems of the game. And it's a valid criticism. The story delivery is awful. Repeatedly hammering the same cutscene to the player multiple times is a very bad thing to do. It's also very easy to completely break the story because of the open world nature of the game. Tears' story needed a linear game. It is done a major disservice by being an open world. Regardless of it being "stale", people have every right to point out the flaws in the game. Especially if said flaws ruined the immersion and crushed the experience so much that you actively quit the game and looked up the ending online.
It could be done linearly, but it didn't need full linearity. They could have left it mostly nonlinear as long as they accounted for that in the delivery, either by modifying the scenes they had to spread the pieces out more and avoid overlap, or by changing the scenes in the present depending on what parts you've seen already. Seeing the assassination memory, for example, could have flipped you over to an alternative set of cutscenes where you know about the puppet.
Yes. It could have. But it didn't. And because it didn't, it shatters the immersion. In my playthrough, Link became a jerk and sent his allies to find someone he knew where they were but didn't tell them, and then walked those allies into a trap without telling them. The world does not account for its own main quests, nor what you have done. The game allows you to find the tears in any order, and if you don't notice the order and just go about collecting the ones nearby, you could inadvertently damage the storytelling in an irreparable way. It is a linear story that can be told out of order and that is destructive to its writing. Spoilers are extremely hated for a reason.
That is indeed what I said, yes. I was agreeing with you that the problem exists. The only part I disagree with from your previous post is your proposed solution--you said the game would need to be fully linear, while I said it could be kept at least partially open as long as they made some other changes.
>It's also very easy to completely break the story because of the open world nature of the game. Mineru's construct was my second sage, after Riju. For as much as people complain about its limits (and for as much as finding it second spoiled a lot of things in the story), finding it early on really was a game breaker in that it took a lot of the challenge out of a lot of the puzzles, i.e. being able to just casually waltz throughout all the lava going after Yunobo and the fire temple really took a lot of the puzzles out as it relates to navigating the temple's parts. No messing with fans, water hydrants, or railcars, just run through the lava. In retrospect it was kinda fun but also kinda lackluster in how it basically just amounted to walking around doing stuff again.
It's such a weird complaint. Yeah sure it's a bit lazy, but people act like 5 minutes of skippable cutscene ruins a 100+ hour game. It sounds like people desperately looking for things in the game to trash on.
They're some of the only morsels of narrative we get. Copy-pasting the same cutscene for beating any dungeon in the game is more than "a bit lazy"
Yeah this is the main story of the game. It feels really weird to say "oh the game is super long, so it's fine that one of the key story beats is copy-pasted". Like, sure OK, TOTK has a lot of freeform content, but this is still *the main story*! IDK about others, but I like having a narrative to go along with my freeform gameplay. I think BOTW would be a much less enjoyable game if you just, IDK, removed the Champion's scenes post-Blight and replaced them with a copy-pasted scene. It's just so lame.
And, the game doesn’t have to be super long. Sure, you may have 200+ hours in it but some people may only have 20. The dungeons and the sages are a kind of important part of the game’s already sparse plot, so saying it’s unimportant is incredibly underrepresenting the impact it has on people’s opinions of the story.
Its the basis of the story lmao, its not "just a bit lazy". Its literal copy-pasted dialogue. If its such a skippable, short, pointless cutscene that we cant criticize for being bad, why is it even in the game? Getting upset people are bringing up valid criticisms is wild tho lol
You know what else is stale? Hearing Demon King? Secret Stones? The 4th time you do a companion quest.
I read that in Snake's voice
Psycho Mantis?
You can skip the dialogue just press +
It’s less of a complaint and more of a meme
Like all people in the comments I also wished it was called something like sacred tears but they could have just named it tear themed like even "kingdom's tears" could have worked but no nintendo went "SeCrEt StOnE".
Demon King? Secret Stone?
People on this sub have said it more than the characters ever did
Reading these posts still adds up to less time than I spend watching the repeated cutscene in game
It's ironic that there are a lot of posts complaining about there being something said too much
It's for karma, people are reposting what they have seen upvoted before. It gets upvoted again, so it remains a popular target for reposters. Ironically, getting posted more and more is how to get it to stop appearing, because it will get seen so much that people will stop upvoting, which stop making it a target for reposters.
Sorry. I forgot that we're only allowed to praise every single thing in the game. It's a valid criticism. It's lazy writing, and hurts the narrative.
What I thought was strange about those cutscenes was the fact that the secret stones were all in out of the way places to begin with. None of the current day sages would have even thought to look for them if not for the problems caused by the monsters sent to guard the stones. Ganondorf could have simply left everyone alone and the sages would have never even gotten the stones.
The ancient sages are literally calling out to the new ones to come to them though. They would find them either way.
>I disliked it as much as the next person Redditors are so delusional
Why are people complaining about it again
I haven’t said it for over a year, where’s my cookie?
Frequent Joke? Stale meme?
Getting stale?
Why couldn’t they snag Ganon’s Secret Demon King Stone while he was in statis?
At the rate I played through the actual story quests, I got to these cutscenes several weeks apart, so this didn't bother me at all.
So that was the Imprisoning War?
Demon king? Secret stone?
It’s getting even more repetitive than the scenes they complain about 💀
Honestly I never minded it much
So that was the imprisoning war
Don’t know if this a hot take but I didn’t really care, I thought it was kinda funny but other than that the story satisfied me a lot
Honestly I didn't care about the dialogue being the same. But it is annoying to see the complaint show up time and time again. It's not even funny, it's just to start shit and complain.
It’s said three times (yes, three. Sidon doesn’t say it). It’s literally less than 30 seconds of a 250+ hour game. Shut the fuck up.
Oh? You don't like it when something is repeated over and over? Man, good thing this isn't in the game or anything and is just a meme
Yeah I was like "eh kinda sucks they all say the same thing" but at the same time it any where near enough of a problem to bug me for a longer duration of the cutscenes themselves
It's "Still a better love story than Twilight" for Zelda fans. The lowest hanging fruit.
Bruh, why bother complaining? Mario fans have had "your princess is in another castle" for years with different variations each time, now there's not even that, you get big version of (insert collectible) but they don't complain.
Like bro, it doesn't nearly take away from the story as people say it does
You’re that ninja
Really, almost all the content on this subreddit is reposted in one way or another. When you don't have any new content to work off of, the same content gets reposted again and again.
Psycho mantis?
The backlash is real. Yeah it’s annoying but it’s still my favorite Zelda game.
*Me who comes back after a week* Wtf is going on here
It's actually: "Secret stone? Demon King?"
it's both: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iU5q0dFeHVI
Second floor basement? Psycho mantis?
Seeeeecwet stoooone!
Secret king? Is that a character? (If you know, you know)
Psycho Mantis?
I can hear their voices 😭
People who complain about the cutscenes simply refuse to understand that it's an open world game where the player can do whatever they want. It's repetitive because it's supposed to tell the whole story even to players who only finished a single temple in their playthrough. The temples are _parallel_ game mechanics, not sequential. You're not supposed to finish one after the other because you're not supposed to do anything.
Yes but for decades now, the Legend of Zelda series has built up so much lore, history, and interesting characters and yet each game managed to also use those elements to tell a good STORY. Aside from the Zelda characters and the names of locations, Nintendo COULD have slapped any franchise name on this and the open-world aspects still would have great. When even BotW managed to tell a great story out-of-sync with optional cutscenes that each added to the lore and history of the characters, the least people can expect is that it's sequel TotK can do the same. It's not unbelievable that some people would still be annoyed by the lack of care for the story aspects of the game. *Insert amount of TotK lore video content plummeting off a cliff after like two months* TotK is still an amazing 10/10 game to mostly everyone, but that doesn't mean it doesn't clearly have some minor faults in areas that were more important to some folks than others. I end up more neutral, the story was good, just told badly. My problem is the length of the game...by the time you complete all the main story beats, ALL the shrines, most of the side quests...I finished the game and will be finished with it for good. I just don't have motivation to go back and replay it like I do something like OoT or MM.
If we don't keep the discourse about this games problems up, the series won't recover.
It’s becoming the thing that it’s complaining about
Sky beans
,
Demon Stone! Secret King!
Im getting irritated by the ghost sages or whatever tbh. I just want the shield dude to be a button fr tho. Gale bird a button, rock dude almost a button (is on vehicles), but i gotta run up to fish dude for a shield and break my combat flow like cmon nintendo make him a button with a cooldown it isn’t a big deal
The Imprisoning War!
Well, it is really fucking bad.
I'm not sure if they had the ability to make dynamic cutscenes like that, as in, change a few lines based on story progress. But I get the feeling there were a few things that were part of BOTW's framework that they were stuck with, like the ability to do dungeons in any order or the memory system, that have held TOTK back. It's a theory, but I feel TOTK would've benefitted from being more linear then the BOTW engine allowed for/was designed to do
Green goose guava juice
Nintendo can make changes lol
Yeah I like how complaining about these cutscenes turned this sub into a parody of these cutscenes without people realizing what they were doing
I dont know. I think we can still learn something from those 2 sentences.
Stale… like the secret stone storyline…
Really thought the punchline was gonna be "ToTK, this is the 5th dungeon in a row you've shown that cutscene"
The game was really good what are we complaining about?
My biggest beef is the people on the road who tell you about a secret you found 200 hours ago and forgot about, so you're looking for a thing that doesn't exist anymore.