I’ve just uninstalled and removed Balatro after yet a near, very close 8/8 ante finish. I have been failing and failing, I’ve only ever seen and gotten to 8/8 ante twice, this being the second time. Every other run has been just insulting me to where no strategy has ever worked, I feel like a lot of it is RNG and pre-determined outcomes based on seeded runs.
And I hate that way of playing. It always feels like I’m getting smacked down by a troll bully who I can never overcome. They’d kick me down every failed run I’d have, then they give me a false sense of security the further I get. “Awwww, getting tired of being owned? Here, let me help you by giving you a few seemingly lucky breaks. SMACK Oh! OWNED YOU AGAIN! FUCK YOU! LOLLOLOL! I BANGED YOUR MOTHER, GIT GUD, NOOB!1”
I just don’t understand why these kinds of games are around, even when I have a good idea who it is for.
I don’t find my weapon breaking every 10 minutes fun, nor do I find the endless wandering with no context clues very engaging. I swear 90% of the stuff you have to stumble onto by dumb luck. It took me months to accidentally bump into that stupid maraca tree thing and expand my inventory. That’s just dumb design.
FWIW, I think they did a much better job in Tears of the Kindgom. Your weapons still break, but you can carry around a basically endless supply of monster parts that you “fuse” to whatever base weapon you happen to come across and it makes them powerful again. Sometimes all you need is a stick to make a good weapon. Still annoying, but waaaaaay less of an inventory management sim IMO.
I thought TOTK was worse cause now you’re also managing the parts inventory. It was so frustrating to get to certain places and find out you didn’t have the necessary parts (like a glider) to do certain things.
I even ended up using duplication glitches to skip resource scavgening and I still felt like I ended up wasting half the game managing my inventory.
I’ll admit i rarely used the machine fusing, I was just talking about the weapon inventory system. I’d just pick up sticks or whatever was around and slam the first “good enough” damage monster part I had to it and kept going. It’s a lot better IMO than having to hang onto all the good stuff and constantly be underpowered because “what if i need it for a boss?”
Having tried and failed to get into it some 8 or 9 times, I have to agree. Maybe it’s different if you grew up playing The Legend of Zelda, but I just found the visuals drab, the combat overly simple and yet slow, and above all like it was trying to be deliberately aggravating to play.
Not at all what one expects from one of the most acclaimed video games of all time, I do wonder how it would have performed had an unknown studio released it as their first game.
How unlike are they though? I haven’t played any of the other games, but from what I’ve seen the chief difference is the open world setting, the gameplay loop is mostly the same.
It didn’t seem like a particularly well executed open world to me, either - while it did give the option to stray from the most direct route to the next dungeon, what you found if you did was mostly emptiness. It even had you climb honest to god Ubisoft towers to uncover the map.
Regardless, I felt like I was missing a frame of reference from the very start. It’s just as well there was no sense of urgency to the central conflict, because I was given no reason to care about the stoic mute elf child or his damsel in the castle.
I’m really curious about your idea of a well-executed open world. Can you give an example? Also about the caring about the plot. I could argue your point about not caring about the fate of the central characters for any game.
You’ve got a really good point. The fact that they don’t gatekeep you using the previous dungeon’s item is completely different than what Zelda games do as a tradition… BUT wandering around an open world and getting a lucky find that is critical to beating the game is so very Zelda 1.
In a mandatory cut scene, a character tells you “Head toward the dueling peaks, then, follow the road to Kakariko village.” Hestu, the inventory expanding broccoli homonculus, is standing on the side of that road in a conspicuous location.
It’s a game about free exploration, it’s silly to expect the player to directly follow these instructions. Just make him part of the mandatory tutorial area or have him come to you after collecting your first 10 seeds or something.
I only found out about the guy after finishing the game.
It’s not just the tree guy. The whole game’s like that.
Here, let me give you another example of the counter-intuitive gameplay I encountered:
The volcano. It’s hot. I need to travel up it.
First attempt: Check my available tools for something. Bombs, no. Timestop, no. Ice pillar, maybe? no. Swords, Shields, Bows… no.
Second attempt: Explore the area, see a hotspring. Try to map out a route using hotsprings as a cooling source. No dice.
Third attempt: Visit all the major cities for info, nothing found other than the volcano is hot. No vendors selling any items that can help.
Fourth attempt: Circle around and try to find a tunnel, putting on all my desert gear to reduce heat damage. Catch fire regardless, no cave found.
Fifth attempt: Load up all my food and make meals, brute force my way to the base camp. No assistance there, have to teleport out.
Sixth attempt: Doing a completely unrelated hunt for a shrine, bump into the NPC selling fire resist potions at a horse stable. A horse stable I mostly ignore because the game lets you teleport everywhere!
Do I feel accomplished, finally finding this only way up the volcano? No! I feel like Nintendo just wasted my time!
Even worse, when I finally make it to the Goron city and buy the fireproof armor, I bump into a Goron who gives me half the recipe to make the fire resist potion. Not even the whole recipe. And he was far far beyond the base camp I brute forced to. If he had been in all the other cities, and with the full recipe, maybe this wouldn’t have been such a challenge of dumb luck.
Wow. Seems like your approach must have been really off the beaten path.
From memory, I think I was offered a fireproof elixir by an NPC at the nearest stable, and by a traveling vendor further up that road, and was given the flamebreaker armor for helping an NPC about halfway to Goron City. (That last one caught my interest because the help needed was in catching fireproof lizards, which seemed relevant to my immediate needs.) Any one of those would have been enough.
Your experience must have been frustrating. Were you avoiding roads and NPCs, by any chance?
Nope, I talked to every NPC at all the towns, and on the roads. But, I didn’t stop at any of the horse stables since I never had need of a horse. It’s all cliffs and teleportation!
Edit: The fireproof armor NPC was only one part of the armor needed to make yourself fireproof, and of course he was at the base camp I had to teleport away from since I was on fire.
I think you only need one piece of the flamebreaker set to be fireproof survive in Goron City. You would need a second piece (or one piece and an elixir) to get closer to the caldera, but by that time you can buy a second piece in the city. You never need the third piece.
I went to the stables just to check out what was there, and discovered that they have quest information, quest triggers, rumors about the world, vendors that don’t show up elsewhere, mini-game challenges with rewards, hints at the locations of Link’s lost memory photos, etc. It never occurred to me that someone might miss out on all that stuff if they weren’t given a reason to visit a stable. (Maybe the game gives a hint to go there? I don’t remember.)
I don’t think I ever found a potion before clearing the area. I remember stocking up on food, like you, and eventually stumbling into the merchant selling me fire resistant armour.
Talking to NPCs to find out things about the immediate area is a major part of the game.
If you do what the King says, you’ll encounter NPCs that have some early world building dialog, an easily climbed tower to start filling in the map and get the shrine sensor, four convenient shrines, one of which has the climbing bandana in it, great time to get that because you don’t have a hat at all yet so the extra armor plus the climbing speed buff is excellent to have, there’s a stable with a sidequest that teaches you how to catch horses, you’ll find Hestu along the path up to Kakariko and likely increase your inventory (or learn that koroks exist), and then in Kakariko the shrine there is a combat tutorial, there’s a fairy fountain nearby, plus Impa sets you on the main quest of the game. Having done four shrines, you can add a heart or stamina wheel sector. Pikango is here, and there are several sidequests in Kakariko to get stuck into.
Impa sends you to Hateno to get the memories sidequest going. Major location in the game with some adventuring and side questing to do, more expository dialog and world building, you get the camera and shiekah sensor, get sent back to Impa, and then you’re kicking around in Kakariko with no immediate goal. You look out one of the exits of town you haven’t taken yet and you see a wide open area with two visible shrines and a tower. Course charted, you get sucked into the Zora plot. Once that’s done, you’ll have Mipha’s Grace, an additional heart, some more armor, and then the training wheels are off and now it’s up to you to pick a direction to explore.
“I didn’t do what the NPC said and didn’t find something important the whole game” gives big “why don’t my kids ever call” energy.
Ignoring your uncalled for insult, that’s just not how I play games.
Once I was free of the tutorial area, I set off in a random direction and did my thing. I completed multiple divine beats before ever setting foot in Kakariko.
If I wanted to follow the direct path as described by NPCs, I might as well go play a linear game. I got to the destinations eventually, but almost never on the beated path.
Wow dude, you go straight to insinuating we’re abuser who’s family abandoned them because we accomplished a goal without follow instructions to the letter in a video game?
I love these games, but I totally agree with you. I missed hestu and didn’t find him for probably the first 15 hours of the game. Basically it took someone having pity on me and saying “just go here”, Very frustrating.
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The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild
I don’t find my weapon breaking every 10 minutes fun, nor do I find the endless wandering with no context clues very engaging. I swear 90% of the stuff you have to stumble onto by dumb luck. It took me months to accidentally bump into that stupid maraca tree thing and expand my inventory. That’s just dumb design.
FWIW, I think they did a much better job in Tears of the Kindgom. Your weapons still break, but you can carry around a basically endless supply of monster parts that you “fuse” to whatever base weapon you happen to come across and it makes them powerful again. Sometimes all you need is a stick to make a good weapon. Still annoying, but waaaaaay less of an inventory management sim IMO.
I thought TOTK was worse cause now you’re also managing the parts inventory. It was so frustrating to get to certain places and find out you didn’t have the necessary parts (like a glider) to do certain things.
I even ended up using duplication glitches to skip resource scavgening and I still felt like I ended up wasting half the game managing my inventory.
I’ll admit i rarely used the machine fusing, I was just talking about the weapon inventory system. I’d just pick up sticks or whatever was around and slam the first “good enough” damage monster part I had to it and kept going. It’s a lot better IMO than having to hang onto all the good stuff and constantly be underpowered because “what if i need it for a boss?”
Having tried and failed to get into it some 8 or 9 times, I have to agree. Maybe it’s different if you grew up playing The Legend of Zelda, but I just found the visuals drab, the combat overly simple and yet slow, and above all like it was trying to be deliberately aggravating to play.
Not at all what one expects from one of the most acclaimed video games of all time, I do wonder how it would have performed had an unknown studio released it as their first game.
BotW and its sequel are so unlike any other Zelda game, I doubt having played or grown up with other Zelda games would be helpful.
How unlike are they though? I haven’t played any of the other games, but from what I’ve seen the chief difference is the open world setting, the gameplay loop is mostly the same.
It didn’t seem like a particularly well executed open world to me, either - while it did give the option to stray from the most direct route to the next dungeon, what you found if you did was mostly emptiness. It even had you climb honest to god Ubisoft towers to uncover the map.
Regardless, I felt like I was missing a frame of reference from the very start. It’s just as well there was no sense of urgency to the central conflict, because I was given no reason to care about the stoic mute elf child or his damsel in the castle.
I’m really curious about your idea of a well-executed open world. Can you give an example? Also about the caring about the plot. I could argue your point about not caring about the fate of the central characters for any game.
You’ve got a really good point. The fact that they don’t gatekeep you using the previous dungeon’s item is completely different than what Zelda games do as a tradition… BUT wandering around an open world and getting a lucky find that is critical to beating the game is so very Zelda 1.
In a mandatory cut scene, a character tells you “Head toward the dueling peaks, then, follow the road to Kakariko village.” Hestu, the inventory expanding broccoli homonculus, is standing on the side of that road in a conspicuous location.
It’s a game about free exploration, it’s silly to expect the player to directly follow these instructions. Just make him part of the mandatory tutorial area or have him come to you after collecting your first 10 seeds or something.
I only found out about the guy after finishing the game.
It’s not just the tree guy. The whole game’s like that.
Here, let me give you another example of the counter-intuitive gameplay I encountered:
The volcano. It’s hot. I need to travel up it.
First attempt: Check my available tools for something. Bombs, no. Timestop, no. Ice pillar, maybe? no. Swords, Shields, Bows… no.
Second attempt: Explore the area, see a hotspring. Try to map out a route using hotsprings as a cooling source. No dice.
Third attempt: Visit all the major cities for info, nothing found other than the volcano is hot. No vendors selling any items that can help.
Fourth attempt: Circle around and try to find a tunnel, putting on all my desert gear to reduce heat damage. Catch fire regardless, no cave found.
Fifth attempt: Load up all my food and make meals, brute force my way to the base camp. No assistance there, have to teleport out.
Sixth attempt: Doing a completely unrelated hunt for a shrine, bump into the NPC selling fire resist potions at a horse stable. A horse stable I mostly ignore because the game lets you teleport everywhere!
Do I feel accomplished, finally finding this only way up the volcano? No! I feel like Nintendo just wasted my time!
Even worse, when I finally make it to the Goron city and buy the fireproof armor, I bump into a Goron who gives me half the recipe to make the fire resist potion. Not even the whole recipe. And he was far far beyond the base camp I brute forced to. If he had been in all the other cities, and with the full recipe, maybe this wouldn’t have been such a challenge of dumb luck.
Wow. Seems like your approach must have been really off the beaten path.
From memory, I think I was offered a fireproof elixir by an NPC at the nearest stable, and by a traveling vendor further up that road, and was given the flamebreaker armor for helping an NPC about halfway to Goron City. (That last one caught my interest because the help needed was in catching fireproof lizards, which seemed relevant to my immediate needs.) Any one of those would have been enough.
Your experience must have been frustrating. Were you avoiding roads and NPCs, by any chance?
Nope, I talked to every NPC at all the towns, and on the roads. But, I didn’t stop at any of the horse stables since I never had need of a horse. It’s all cliffs and teleportation!
Edit: The fireproof armor NPC was only one part of the armor needed to make yourself fireproof, and of course he was at the base camp I had to teleport away from since I was on fire.
I think you only need one piece of the flamebreaker set to
be fireproofsurvive in Goron City. You would need a second piece (or one piece and an elixir) to get closer to the caldera, but by that time you can buy a second piece in the city. You never need the third piece.I went to the stables just to check out what was there, and discovered that they have quest information, quest triggers, rumors about the world, vendors that don’t show up elsewhere, mini-game challenges with rewards, hints at the locations of Link’s lost memory photos, etc. It never occurred to me that someone might miss out on all that stuff if they weren’t given a reason to visit a stable. (Maybe the game gives a hint to go there? I don’t remember.)
Sorry you drew the short straw.
whaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaat.
it’s true!
But the game has established multiple times that a set only gives a bonus on full equip!
I don’t think I ever found a potion before clearing the area. I remember stocking up on food, like you, and eventually stumbling into the merchant selling me fire resistant armour.
The only reason I didn’t brute force the whole way was I ran out of food.
Talking to NPCs to find out things about the immediate area is a major part of the game.
If you do what the King says, you’ll encounter NPCs that have some early world building dialog, an easily climbed tower to start filling in the map and get the shrine sensor, four convenient shrines, one of which has the climbing bandana in it, great time to get that because you don’t have a hat at all yet so the extra armor plus the climbing speed buff is excellent to have, there’s a stable with a sidequest that teaches you how to catch horses, you’ll find Hestu along the path up to Kakariko and likely increase your inventory (or learn that koroks exist), and then in Kakariko the shrine there is a combat tutorial, there’s a fairy fountain nearby, plus Impa sets you on the main quest of the game. Having done four shrines, you can add a heart or stamina wheel sector. Pikango is here, and there are several sidequests in Kakariko to get stuck into.
Impa sends you to Hateno to get the memories sidequest going. Major location in the game with some adventuring and side questing to do, more expository dialog and world building, you get the camera and shiekah sensor, get sent back to Impa, and then you’re kicking around in Kakariko with no immediate goal. You look out one of the exits of town you haven’t taken yet and you see a wide open area with two visible shrines and a tower. Course charted, you get sucked into the Zora plot. Once that’s done, you’ll have Mipha’s Grace, an additional heart, some more armor, and then the training wheels are off and now it’s up to you to pick a direction to explore.
“I didn’t do what the NPC said and didn’t find something important the whole game” gives big “why don’t my kids ever call” energy.
Ignoring your uncalled for insult, that’s just not how I play games.
Once I was free of the tutorial area, I set off in a random direction and did my thing. I completed multiple divine beats before ever setting foot in Kakariko.
If I wanted to follow the direct path as described by NPCs, I might as well go play a linear game. I got to the destinations eventually, but almost never on the beated path.
Wow dude, you go straight to insinuating we’re abuser who’s family abandoned them because we accomplished a goal without follow instructions to the letter in a video game?
It does remind me strongly of the people I’ve cut off, yes.
no reflection at all on how 0 to 11 that reaction is? Huh… Well, another to add to the block list I guess.
I love these games, but I totally agree with you. I missed hestu and didn’t find him for probably the first 15 hours of the game. Basically it took someone having pity on me and saying “just go here”, Very frustrating.