I love writing this list each and every year, at least in part because a “scene” in a movie can be great for so many different reasons. Some years, however, a single genre or sub-genre of film dominates my watch list so heavily that some of the fun range gets lost. 2023 was one of those years, but because said source of dominance happened to be non-superhero action movies, I don’t mind one bit. This was a year teeming with examples of kinetic, pulse-pounding filmmaking craft – among other kinds of standout moments, of course – and I’m so excited to dive in. So let’s do that.
There are, naturally, a ton of spoilers on this page, so tread carefully.
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VR BEST OF 2023 DISCLAIMER
This list represents my opinion only. I am not asserting any kind of superiority or self-importance by presenting it as I have. My opinion is not fact. If you agree with me 100%, go buy a lottery ticket. Respectful disagreement is most welcome
MASSIVE SPOILERS FOLLOW!
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10. No Sleep Till Brooklyn – Guardians of the Galaxy Vol.3
Hey, I didn’t say there’d be no superhero action scenes – and if you’ve seen Guardians 3 you had to know this one was going to show up. The hallway brawl at the climax of the movie is three crucial things all in one: a magnificently-choreographed speed-shifting one-shot filled with faux-gore and crowd-pleasing team-up moves; an amazing song from a series famous for its amazing soundtracks; and most importantly, an emotionally resonant fist-pumper of a final combat moment for the Guardians team, spearheaded by the film’s emotional centre Rocket Raccoon and finished by the effectively all-new, all-different Gamora. Marvel’s best three minutes of the year.
9. Village Raid – The Creator
A testament to the enduring power of great shot selection and sound design, the US Army raid on a fishing village at the climax of The Creator’s second act is an effective microcosm of the whole film: it looks way better than it has any right to, it doesn’t hide from utilising gorgeous wide shots that would showcase blemishes easier, and it packs an immense serving of dread into a lean package. Extended sections of the scene have no music at all, and the ominous accelerating clunks of the self-destruct tin can robots obscured by weapon smoke is bone-chilling partially because of this – and partially because of their pre-sprint dialogue.
In the world of dedicated videogame consoles, 2023 felt in many ways like the true dawn of a new generation; in hindsight the pandemic-punctuated pageantry of 2020’s eleventh hour now kinda reads like a pillow-soft launch with only trivia night technicality in mind. It may have been a rollercoaster of a year for PC gaming – an astonishing density of poor ports sprinkled among a fleet of immensely exciting pushes into the handheld space – but the console world brought some semblance of confident, comforting familiarity to 2023. The slow transition from the last generation is finally approaching its end with real intent – bringing a controversial return to normalcy for 30 FPS visuals along with it as Unreal Engine 5 leads the way down a road the last generation cannot travel.
But we can still fill out a top five for now, so let’s do that.
My ranking is based on new developments in each console’s wheelhouse, primarily concerning exclusive games but also taking in factors like firmware updates and hardware/accessory additions. As always, mostly due to how wide and varied their ecosystems are, Mobile and PC are disregarded for this list.
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VR BEST OF 2023 DISCLAIMER
This list represents my opinion only. I am not asserting any kind of superiority or self-importance by presenting it as I have. My opinion is not fact. If you agree with me 100%, go buy a lottery ticket. Respectful disagreement is most welcome.
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5. Playstation 4
LAST YEAR: 4th
‘Twas the year the fourth Playstation home console effectively began its last march into the pages of history. Though plenty of major circumstances were out of Sony’s control this time, the company’s famous decade-long support plan for its numbered videogame machines has perhaps been a little easier to uphold in the case of the PS4 than its two older brothers: neither the PS2 nor the PS3 enjoyed quite this many of their allocated ten years as a lead platform for brand-new prestige videogame releases. Yet here we are at the end of 2023, and Sony’s lean exclusives lineup for the year has effectively skipped the fourth home Playstation. A couple of bigger third-party games have followed suit – although back-ports for the likes of Hogwarts Legacy and Star Wars: Jedi Survivor proved that the very biggest are still unable to resist the allure of that ocean of existing last-gen machines.
4. Xbox One
LAST YEAR: 5th
A pretty similar situation to the PS4 here, except the Xbox One console family did receive the same home screen UI update that the newer Series consoles got, so it’s kind of ahead by default. Furthermore, the comparison between the Game Pass and PS+ Extra offerings continues to favour the Xbox side by some margin, but when you filter down the comparison to just day-one indie titles – which invariably have no problem running on last-gen tech – the head-to-head picture becomes even rosier for the ol’ Xbone. With a game pass subscription and a cheap second-hand Xbox in 2023, you could enjoy the likes of Cocoon, Cassette Beasts, Bramble: The Mountain King, Sea of Stars, Thirsty Suitors, Fuga: Memories of Steel 2,Steamworld Build, Party Animals, Venba, The Last Case of Benedict Fox, Planet of Lana, and Roboquest – and the last three are currently unavailable on a Sony or Nintendo platform. Not bad at all.
Crawling into my second decade as a Korean music listener feels, well, a lot like I expected, actually. The signs were there from as early as 2017 that as I got older, I would likely float away from the scene’s glitzier offerings and gravitate more towards the R&B side, where the production is often just as good but the vocal talent shines through more and the moods vary more widely. This is still unquestionably a K-Pop list first and foremost, but you may notice the soloist-to-group ratio increase and the overall energy mellow a little this year.
It’s just as well, because among other garbage news 2023 gave us a record-time collapse of the most promising girl group in years – Fifty-Fifty went from viral worldwide hit to Barbie movie soundtrack to contract lawsuit to 75% member exodus in well under a year. Not that there wasn’t plenty to enjoy at the forefront of mainstream K-Pop this year, but the increasing brutality of the business is making it more difficult to invest in newer groups over time.
To reflect my growing appreciation for the less mainstream corners of the industry, I’ve decided to relax my decade-long rule that songs have to be accompanied by music videos in order to count for this list; but if they don’t have one, then they need to be the lead track off their respective album or EP.
As always, only songs with Korean lyrics count, but you should still definitely check out Le Sserafim’s Japanese song Choices, Jungkook’s all-English effort Standing Next to You, Riot Games’ Baekhyun-backed PARANOIA, æspa’s remix-friendly Better Things, and everything Forestella released this year.
Put on your good headphones, turn off those pesky auto-captions (if you want), and let’s step into the groove.
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VR BEST OF 2023 DISCLAIMER
This list represents my opinion only. I am not asserting any kind of superiority or self-importance by presenting it as I have. My opinion is not fact. If you agree with me 100%, go buy a lottery ticket. Respectful disagreement is most welcome.
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15. What’s Happening – Min Kyoung Song
We start a little bit spicy in 2023. “This isn’t K-Pop!” you may cry, “It’s clearly a traditional Korean trot song!” Well firstly, over eleven years into this hobby I kinda find all the melting genre lines to be almost pointless; secondly, this isn’t even the first time I’ve included trot stuff on this list; and most importantly, that chorus breakdown is just full-steam modern K-Pop anyway. The trot strings in the background may as well be stylistic window dressing by the time the full EDM sound wall hits, and the combo goes surprisingly hard. There’s even some simple point choreography at the chorus, and because Min Kyoung Song doesn’t have much else to hide behind in her field, you get uncommonly powerful vocals to go with your filthy drops. Give it a go.
14. Boogie Man – LUCY
We transition from a trot song to a band that includes among its ranks an honest-to-goodness violinist unafraid to show off; Lucy’s Boogie Man is a touch of Halloween on Christmas for you. K-Pop bands are usually a bit hit-and-miss for me, but Korean band songs I’ve enjoyed have historically had the kind of bouncy rhythm that Boogie Man provides. But there is oh so much more to enjoy on top of that rhythm: the funky guitar lick after each chorus, the Persona 5-esque violin response after the chorus call, the two separate incidents of headphone-trick knocking, the full violin solo bit, the ghostly wails in the back. No one is going to accuse the creepy music video of being low-effort either; top effort from the Lucy lads.
It’s time to dip into the first of our three movie lists, and with that comes somewhat of a return to regular service as far as standout celluloid characters are concerned. After the class of 2022 brought an unusually high percentage of protagonists to the table, 2023’s roll is once again all about those dastardly villains and spicy supporting characters.
Although we aren’t in full-on spoiler territory yet, sometimes talking about what makes characters so impactful necessitates a mild plot detail or two, so keep an eye out for that if you see a movie title you would still rather watch first.
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VR BEST OF 2023 DISCLAIMER
This list represents my opinion only. I am not asserting any kind of superiority or self-importance by presenting it as I have. My opinion is not fact. If you agree with me 100%, go buy a lottery ticket. Respectful disagreement is most welcome.
Some spoilers may follow.
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10. Joyce – A Haunting in Venice
A Haunting in Venice is an ensemble murder mystery, so Joyce doesn’t have as much screen time as the trailers may lead you to believe, but I don’t blame the film’s marketing team for wanting to push Michelle Yeoh’s presence hard after the stellar couple of years she’s had. It’s also completely justified in the movie itself, as her creepy charisma as Joyce reverberates through every scene in which she holds the frame. Joyce’s is-she-conning-us / is-she-for-real commitment essentially transitions another standard Hercule Poirot mystery into the first full-on horror story of Kenneth Brannagh’s 21st century run with the character – and it absolutely elevates the movie – but it’s the wry smiles and flowery undercurrent of disdain in her dialogue that gets Joyce onto the list to kick us off.
9. Bowser – The Super Mario Bros Movie
A modern take on a Super Mario Bros movie was probably always going to lean comedic for as many side characters as it could get away with, but Nintendo’s own games – particularly their Mario-centric RPGs – have already poked a whole mountain range of fun at the absurdity of Bowser enough times that some fans worried Illumination’s perspective on the classic villain may come off a bit tired. But then the film cast Jack Black, and those concerns went away immediately. The movie well and truly lives up to the potential of a Bowser/Black pairing and then some, as the hammy specialist commits to the role wholeheartedly; if anything, the biggest surprise is how menacing he makes Bowser sound at the right times.
That’s right – 2008’s loudest naysayers were not heeded, and their worst nightmares have come to fruition. Here we stand after a year so positively crammed with quality videogame re-releases and downloadable content expansions that we can gloss over them no longer: they are getting their very own page this year. Much like the K-Pop albums countdown, said page will be separated into two top fives…
…is what I would have said, if the sheer strength of the DLC this year hadn’t forced my hand long after I decided to draft this page, so now it’s a top 4 and a top 6? A bit messier, yes, but hey, a lot of this stuff rivals full games released this year; it had to be done.
If you notice a particularly conspicuous major absence from the re-release section, it’s worth mentioning that only the first five out of the seven categories from this article are eligible for consideration here: “reimaginings” and reboots have to fight it out with everyone else on the main list. Parentheses indicate the platform where I played each entry.
Of course this all means that the rather flexible “Special Awards” list that stood in this slot since 2018 is taking a hiatus; but for the record I would’ve probably given Best Third Party Publisher to Capcom (Resident Evil 4, Street Fighter 6, Exoprimal, Ghost Trick, Megaman Battle Network Legacy Collection), Best Indie Publisher to Team17 (Dredge, Headbangers, Blasphemous 2, Moving Out 2), and Best Videogame Adaptation to HBO’s The Last of Us – although that last category was unusually competitive this year.
All sorted? Let’s kick on with this.
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VR BEST OF 2023 DISCLAIMER
This list represents my opinion only. I am not asserting any kind of superiority or self-importance by presenting it as I have. My opinion is not fact. If you agree with me 100%, go buy a lottery ticket. Respectful disagreement is most welcome.
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– – – – – – – – RE-RELEASES – – – – – – – –
4. System Shock (PC)
One of the coolest stylistic game remakes I’ve ever seen, the 2023 System Shock project takes a pixelated first-person PC classic and completely rebuilds the world using low-res 3D “voxels”, ensuring a stunning neon colour palette that runs smooth as butter even on low-power portable PC systems. Drastically modernising the gameplay was not necessarily on the top of the priority list for developers Nightdive Studios, so meticulous menu management and item balancing is still the order of the day, but combat feels nice and punchy while the unsettling weirdness that eventually inspired the brilliance of Bioshock is fully preserved in all its skeevy sci-fi glory. It really sucks that Steam cloud saves still aren’t working properly for the game at the time of writing, though.
3. Advance Wars 1+2 Re-Boot Camp (NS)
One of the most unlikely revivals in Nintendo’s catalogue may already be dead again thanks to an entire year’s delay brought about by real-world events, but if this fantastic package is the only word we hear from the Advance Wars series for the next decade, I’ll have to begrudgingly admit I’m OK with that. Veteran indie outfit Wayforward has absolutely nailed the most crucial parts of the Advance Wars experience, enlivening a controversial toy-like art style with countless animation touches (Kanbei’s CO Power animation, anyone?) and tweaking the enemy AI just enough to balance challenge and nostalgia. Most importantly, this might be the best approach to music in a videogame remake I have ever played, and I’m not just saying that because The Consouls did Sensei’s Theme. Of course I do fervently hope this is not the end, and it now has to be the WF team who are trusted with the next step in this series’ mythical return.
For the first time since 2017, the hub of negativity that traditionally kicks off this site’s annual look back is condensed to five entries. That’s almost entirely thanks to a brand-new list that goes live tomorrow and needs the space, but the kinds of disappointing news and trends that tend to make the cut are also kinda easy to categorise in bunches this year – for the most part. And that means we can also get it out of the way quickly to focus on the good stuff.
As has been the case for many years now, this is a petty personal list first and foremost: it does not tend to cover anything from the (depressingly long and ever-present) list of examples of people treating other people without basic human dignity within the movie or games industries. If I couldn’t use this page to complain about first-world problems, the list wouldn’t exist and we’d just be focusing on positives the whole way down. That said, time to get some things off my chest.
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VR BEST OF 2023 DISCLAIMER
This list represents my opinion only. I am not asserting any kind of superiority or self-importance by presenting it as I have. My opinion is not fact. If you agree with me 100%, go buy a lottery ticket. Respectful disagreement is most welcome.
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5. Curse of the 7s
As plenty of writers were eager to repeat over the course of 2023, it was a bad year to be a publically accepted “7/10” videogame. Before you dismiss that statement as always true anyway and scroll on, remember a 7/10 videogame is not a bad game: it just usually appeals less to players not usually invested in the genre than an 8 or 9 might. Virtually every year my top games list includes a couple of examples where critical consensus and I do not meet, and those paragraphs are often my favourite to write.
But oh boy, this was definitely not the year to be one of those games.
When your competition for people’s free time is the latest Final Fantasy, Street Fighter, Diablo or Zelda, any perceived flaw strong enough to knock you below 75-80 on Meta/Opencritic will always hurt more. In the case of Exoprimal, one of my most anticipated games of the year, that flaw was the lack of any sort of party matchmaking (a blow that would’ve landed the game its own spot on this list any other year). For The Last Case of Benedict Fox, it was a cluttered UI and just a few too many frame drops on the Xbox Series S. For Atomic Heart, an overly chatty sidekick and a failure to capitalise on a strong opening. For Immortals of Aveum – an otherwise impressive Unreal Engine 5 visual showcase with super-slick production – it was a script too eager to ape the modern Marvel movie formula. In the latter case, as well as many others no doubt, the result was the slashing of a talented and promising development team, and when poor release timing is to blame it just feels so cruel.
4. Nintendo’s Wild Patent Spree
Though it never goes down well and usually happens as stealthily as possible, major videogame companies looking to stave off competition by patenting in-game mechanics is nothing new; famous examples include the Nemesis system from Warner Bros’ Middle Earth duology and Namco’s long-standing exclusive ability to run minigames on loading screens. But Nintendo’s 2023 patent application streak for mechanics within Tears of the Kingdom raised more than a few eyebrows when it came to light that the company wanted to own (or take payment for) things as banal as riding a moving object without physically interacting with it, or a fast travel preview on a loading screen.
From one tiny angle this makes sense: you can imagine games like Immortals: Fenix Rising and Genshin Impact scaring the Kyoto bigwigs with some of their direct inspiration from Breath of the Wild. But, like, come on man. A gaming world without a company as big as Nintendo doing its own quirky thing would be unbearably dull (especially with the current sedate state of Sony), but that doesn’t mean the folks at the Big N should own every innovation they come up with – let alone ones they do not. That’s hardly the way to a better industry, and honestly this kind of attitude makes me worry that the current Nintendo upper management might not believe they can continue to conjure up more weird innovation in the future.
This is meant to be a trend-focused post, so while we’re talking about Nintendo-adjacent disappointments:
The mass disqualifications at the Pokemon World Championships thanks to eleventh-hour changes to how team-building rules are enforced didn’t make anyone involved look good at all;
Though expected, forewarned and unfortunately kind of inevitable, the definitive closure of the 3DS and Wii U eShops back in March was a grim reminder of the limitations of digital storefronts – and Nintendo’s own distaste for letting people play their old games on new platforms.
Maybe one day the stuff I talk about on this site will be anything other than endlessly fascinating, but that day did not come in 2023 – even if the discussion flavouring this year came with a dark undertone.
In 2023 the economic realities of our favourite entertainment media avenues walked right up to our faces and screamed: an unprecedented dual-strike brought Hollywood to a standstill right after the most celebrated accidental double bill in history; the most promising K-Pop newcomers in ages rose meteorically from nothing until they were on the soundtrack of that very same Hollywood double bill, then crashed and burned months later; and the videogame industry suffered roughly seven times the layoffs of 2022, as years of irresponsible trend-chasing financial choices by publishing heads came back to bite both them and the overworked developers they used to employ.
And yet so many of the games, big and small, that were released in 2023 blew away expectations, flattened critics, and delighted fans. Multiple genres had all-time great years, and free time around the globe came under threat again and again. 2023 might just have hosted the greatest new videogame lineup of all time.
Movie releases – especially of the action variety – had a banner year, and the standard for well-crafted choreography has never been higher, nor has that high standard been hit as often. Several of the world’s greatest directors unleashed films unafraid of traditional runtime restrictions. Cinephiles ate shockingly well in 2023.
And as long as you’re not too precious about subgenre lines (I haven’t been for a while), the Korean tunes this year were smooooth.
Welcome to Vagrant Rant’s Best of 2023 series. We start tomorrow and go till 2024; join me if you fancy.
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VR BEST OF 2023 DISCLAIMER
These lists represent my opinion only. I am not asserting any kind of superiority or self-importance by presenting it as I have. My opinion is not fact. If you agree with me 100%, go buy a lottery ticket. Respectful disagreement is most welcome.
I have a slightly unsettling number of YouTube watch hours banked on analytical video essays, particularly of the movie and (most relevantly here) gaming variety;
I am a huge believer in the power of properly-managed expectations when it comes to the personal enjoyment I find in entertainment media (which, after all, is meant to entertain);
My enjoyment of videogames is often directly tied to my ability to discuss them with others before, during and after I play them (this one shouldn’t shock anyone). To put it plainly, when I enjoy discussing games with people – whether online or in person – I enjoy those games more.
These points have naturally come together over the course of the last several years to ensure I’ve responded strongly to the following ten analytical YouTube videos. These aren’t the only ten that have ever struck me – not even close – but I felt like shouting out these in particular because each one has either given me a perspective-altering revelation that helped me look at the videogames I play and discuss in a more balanced way, and/or laid out in clear terms something I’d already felt about said games but was unable to properly articulate. These ten may total around three and a half hours watched back-to-back, but they also happen to be on the shorter side of my Favourites playlist, believe it or not, so as much as I really want to put a Kotaku-era Tim Rogers video here, I’ll resist.
Yes, that makes what you’re about to read the equivalent of ten separate way-too-long YouTube comments, but I mainly want to highlight the videos themselves. They may definitely skew towards topics that happen to interest me specifically, but have a watch of a few if you want, maybe listen to them while doing something monotonous, and hopefully you’ll find a view or two worthwhile. You might even pick up a new subscription.
Subjectivity Is Implied
Joseph Anderson, 2018
Main Takeaway: “Objective opinions” don’t exist, and entirely objective analyses are boring.
We start with the most reactionary video of the lot – it’s clear Mr Anderson recorded this rant as a frustrated response to wider media literacy trends – but it has to go first because the point at its centre informs (or should inform) every other analytical video, ever.
Despite its title, the video tackles two sides of the same fallacious coin: the silly idea that publicised takes on videogames should be clarified as subjective opinions repeatedly to eliminate all possible option for devious deception, and the even sillier idea that every videogame take must endeavour to be an “objective opinion”, which as Joe describes, is like “asking for the conversational equivalent of hot frozen ice cream”.
That second part in particular has long been a frustration of mine to explain to people, and this Anderson essay is a fascinating breakdown of the issue that ends up with a remarkably charitable attitude to the potential reasons why people might think they want such an oxymoron, despite the author’s gritted-teeth presentational tone. It’s the video that inspired the idea for this list many years ago, and it’s well worth a watch.
Breath of the Wild’s “Disneyland Problem”
Mother’s Basement, 2017
Main Takeaway: Your job – and exposure to videogames – significantly affects your preferences.
This one has rapidly turned into a bit of an odd time capsule – Geoff Thew doesn’t even do videogame content anymore, having long since made his real YouTube fortune through the popular niche of anime openings, and so none of the hypothetical Breath of the Wild videos he mentions in the beginning actually came to pass. Yet despite this, the video he did make is the most compelling illustration of reviewer-to-fandom dissonance I have ever seen, and it achieves this almost as an accident on the way to mounting a wide-angle defense of one specific game against perceived criticism a mere month into its long life.
By the sheer nostalgic charm of a fired-up attitude in a lo-fi-by-current-standards setup, confident enough to oppose “let’s call them idiots” via hastily-assembled bullet points but relatably self-conscious in his repeated links to other video essays, Thew casts light on the high-pressure environmental context that causes many professional videogame reviewers to value polish, novelty, relative brevity and accessible flow-state over other desirable qualities in games. And he’s bang-on the money.
Not only has this distinction helped me filter what I read or watch the weekend of a new game’s launch while preparing for the often-inevitable counter-opinions to come, it’s also helped me work out why I tend to value the same elements highly as well. After all, I may not be paid to write about games, but after decades surrounding myself with constant new releases and reactions to those new releases, my preferences occasionally shake out shockingly similar. As stupid as it may sound, realising all this has helped me relax and enjoy the discourse a lot more.
While the rest of the video isn’t as interested in directly backing up the well-made press point, and I disagree with a couple of Thew’s BotW defenses (I would’ve loved to see that “best story in a Zelda game” claim expanded on), he does go on to make a second argument dissolving impossible expectations around supposedly “infinite” games with a pretty elegant Disneyland allegory that’s also worth watching – and may or may not foreshadow another video further down this list.
Genwunner | The Problem with Pokemon’s Artstyle
Purple Gaming, 2019
Main Takeaway: Years of widely accepted majority opinions on game franchises can completely miss the point.
Refining this list down to ten entries required some self-imposed rules, and one of them dictated that I probably shouldn’t bring in too many videos focused on just one game or series, unless that singular focus brought out or supported a conclusion with much wider-reaching implications. That rule eliminated literally hundreds of my favourite videos, but I just had to keep this one.
Even though the content of the video essentially boils down to one narrator riffing off a viral reddit post, that post and Purple Gaming’s exploration of its implications absolutely blew my mind the first time I watched. The very concept that the battle lines of an all-time knuckle-dragging fandom fight have been drawn in the wrong place for decades short-circuited something inside of me, and then honestly made me excited to see what other mainstream accepted gaming opinions might be open to some prodding.
For what it’s worth, the second half of Purple Gaming’s video attempts to fold the major art style debate into some of the usual criticisms against the modern Pokemon games’ stubborn resistance to change, but those issues are perhaps handled better in other videos out there. Still, this is a fun watch.
Here we are already – much slower than last year but still far too quickly. It’s been an eventful middle third of the year for film: a pair of megaton Hollywood strikes with wide-reaching (and justified) implications, no less than three big-name blockbusters releasing as “Part Ones” like it’s the early 2010s all over again, the official end of the ill-fated DCEU, and of course the irresistible juggernaut that was Barbenheimer. The news cycle has been juicy, and the movies haven’t been half-bad either. Most of them, anyway.
A while ago I finished the new Zelda game; my 17th completed Zelda title (from a possible 20) is in the books! Tears of the Kingdom was a ludicrously hefty 148-hour journey, and I had to abandon any hope of reaching my traditional Zelda completion percent goals, but there were too many impending game releases in this truly ridiculous year and it simply had to go in the completed pile. So on the pile it is, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to repeat past mistakes and let it float away without writing anything. Now exactly three months after launch, it’s time to delve into some potential spoilers and talk about TotK. Read on at your own risk.
After all the pre-release speculation, it turns out that The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom does a whole lot to differentiate itself from its predecessor Breath of the Wild, even though it also retroactively codifies a new formula from that game’s legacy by following in specific footsteps. We are talking many articles worth of new and surprising stuff, some of which I still probably haven’t seen. But of most interest to this time and place and writer is the clear effort Nintendo has put into re-aligning the open-ended structure of modern Zelda with a handful of elements more traditional to the series – to mixed success.
I wrote a whole month of needlessly granular Zelda countdowns on this site a decade ago, so this pleases me greatly. What say we ignore all the newfangled systems that actually make ToTK great and go straight into critiquing how successfully each of these traditional “pillars” of the series brings back the good times? Some of these BotW barely had at all, and some are just significantly changed-up from the last outing. What do you mean none of this matters?
Dungeons
* 3 / 5 *
Let’s start with the big one. That’s right: after a significantly different take on the concept via Breath of the Wild’s Divine Beasts, Tears of the Kingdom actually brings back some semblance of region-appropriate themed dungeons with delineated puzzle rooms/areas. There are four of these bad boys in total and each one even packs a proper boss – but do they scratch that nostalgic itch the Link’s Awakening remake and Skyward Sword remaster have reminded us we had in the last half-decade?
Well, not really, but they are a massive step up from those Divine Beasts. Not just because the game actually calls them “temples” either (although that absolutely helps); unlike BotW’s tileset-sharing brown mobile puzzle boxes, each dungeon looks meaningfully different from the other three in both colour scheme and layout. Each is also preceded by some form of testing approach sequence that channels Skyward Swordby tying the overworld to the temple via warm-up puzzles and/or fights; this builds the anticipation of reaching the building itself on four pretty successful occasions.
However, for better or worse the open-ended design powering the last two 3D Zelda games persists within the TotK dungeons, no doubt in part by necessity given the sheer power of Link’s new abilities. Each time the player is tasked with the activation of four or five thematically appropriate devices – in any order – to unlock the final boss room. The potential for the truly gnarly labyrinthine conquests we dreamed of as kids is there, but only the Fire Temple really nudges the kind of scale to realise it, and only the Lightning Temple really makes an attempt to integrate the puzzles leading to its mechanical MacGuffins in a way that harkens back to the glory days of Zelda dungeons. Unshackle the Small Keys, Nintendo!
Vagrant Rant 