I did not finish the thing I said I'd finish this week. I did not do the yard work. I answered maybe half my emails. What I did instead was climb a lot of floating rocks and glue a bunch of wheels to a log, because Tears of the Kingdom came out last Friday and it's got its hooks in me pretty deep.
Quick disclosure so you know where I'm coming from: I put something like 140 hours into Breath of the Wild back in 2017, which even by my own standards is a lot of hours to spend falling off cliffs. So when Nintendo said the sequel was coming, I preordered the day it went up and then mostly tried not to think about it for a year so I wouldn't drive myself nuts waiting.
The midnight launch thing is a whole exercise in nostalgia now, isn't it. I went to the Best Buy near me at like 11:40pm the night before release (so, into the early hours of the 12th) and there were maybe thirty people there, half of them clearly parents doing this as a bit for their teenagers who were on their phones the entire time. Somebody near the front had a Master Sword replica strapped to his back on the bus, presumably, and nobody commented on it, which felt like the most Portland thing that happened all week even though I'm not in Portland.
Anyway. The game. $69.99, which is ten bucks more than the last several Switch games have cost and yes, I noticed, and no, it didn't stop me from buying it, but I'm allowed to grumble about it here on my own blog. Sixteen-point-something gigabytes to download if you go digital, which took long enough on my connection that I made dinner and ate it before the install bar finished.
What's actually got me is the crafting stuff, the Fuse and Ultrahand abilities specifically. Breath of the Wild let you climb anything and cook anything; this one lets you build anything, badly, out of whatever junk is lying around, and the game just lets you do it even when the result is objectively stupid. I built a cart with a fan bolted to the front that mostly just spun in circles. I have also seen, secondhand from a friend who's further in than me, people building actual functioning aircraft with rudimentary steering, which is a different tier of patience than I currently have.
The sky islands are the part everyone's talking about and I get why, they're gorgeous, but if I'm honest the caves and the underground stuff (I won't spoil how you get down there) are what's actually kept me up too late two nights this week. Theres a specific cave with a light-eating enemy in it that had me genuinely tense in a way this series hasn't managed since the first Guardian ambush six years ago.
Two complaints, small ones. The frame rate dips are real, especially anywhere near Hyrule Castle with a lot of physics objects on screen at once — nothing game-breaking, but noticeable if you've got eyes. And there's already a duplication glitch making the rounds online, the kind where you can multiply rare materials by exploiting the fuse-and-drop menu timing, and I give it maybe another week before Nintendo patches it out. If you're going to abuse it, get your fun in now I guess.
Unrelated aside because it's my blog and I can: my left Joy-Con has started drifting again, this is the second one in three years, and I still haven't sent it in for the free repair because the idea of being without a controller mid-playthrough of anything is apparently worse to me than crooked camera angles. I taped a tiny bit of folded paper under the stick like the internet told me to and it's holding for now. Not proud of this solution. It's working though.
I know there's a bunch of other stuff happening in tech this week I should probably have opinions on. I have thoughts on the Google I/O announcements from last week too, the AI search stuff especially, and I'll probably get to that once I'm not spending every free hour gluing rockets to shields. For now I'm going to go see if I can get this contraption up the side of a mountain without it exploding, which, for the record, is a real thing that can happen to you in this game and it is extremely funny every time.