This week, Nintendo Life (NL) published a check-in article for Tears of the Kingdom since it's now been out for three months. So how far have I gotten? My progress is slow yet sweet. I determined at the start to take my time in the game, savoring its vast world. That said, the article sheds light on things I want to accomplish, and I could be enjoying the newest Zelda more than I have been. So what am I waiting for?
First of all, it's hard to nail down my completion percentage because it's only a wild guess. As NL states, players can't see the game's calculated percentage until they've beaten the final boss, which I'm intentionally putting off. I know that if I go and slay the foul beast of Ganon, then I'm extremely likely to feel I'm done with the game and will want to start the other awesome titles on my backlog.
This is what happened to me with Breath of the Wild, and it feels like a bummer that I missed great parts of that game. It's kind of a disservice to these games to not enjoy them to the full.
But what is "full?" No way am I going to find all 1,000 Korok seeds! As NL says, such a feat is one of the criteria factored into a 100% completion. Maybe if I had zero backlog, then I'd...no, not even then.
Of the other completion criteria, discovering all shrines and lightroots is definitely a must. And as for visiting every named location, I want to do most, so not 100% of every single one.
Among the best things about Zelda: TotK is exploration; I love it! In fact, sometimes I prefer to walk or ride horseback (instead of Fast Travel) so I can immerse myself more in the wonderful Hyrule environment, discovering new places and things along the way. And I know there are interesting far reaches of the map I've yet to encounter and can't wait to see what's around those next corners.To gauge where I am along with many others in the latest Zelda, NL shared two polls; the results are interesting.
I am in the nearly half (43%) of all voters (3,255 so far) who have not beaten the final boss, so we don't know our actual completion rating yet. And only 3% have 100-percented the game since its release three months ago.
As for the number of hours people have played TotK thus far, I'm among the 11% who have put in 55-75 hours. My Switch tells me I've played for over 70 hours. And nearly a quarter (24%) of all voters (2,964) have played over 180 hours! I'm lagging, but I'm enjoying it!
The enjoyed minutes, the completed fun moments, that's the part that counts.
Now, with much more to explore and enjoy, what's holding me back? Blogging.
Wait, what? Yes, well, I aimed to write a blog post daily for all of August as part of Blaugust 2023 (I'm enjoying it). It's a goal, a set of tasks, that I'm completing; I want 100% completion! So one post per day for 31 days straight. So far, so good.
At the same time, though, I also thought Blaugust would help me play more of TotK, giving me more to blog about from the game and my play-through while helping me be spurred on by the gamer+blogger community. But this is Blog-gust, not Game-gust. So, yeah, I'm more focused on blogging than gaming.
So it's also "my fault" that I took on an entirely new blogging project this month in addition to my regular blog! I started hand-coding my new html site at Neocities...more about that in a future post or two.
Anyways, August still has about two weeks left in which I can play plenty of TotK. So I'm going to do that...and also blog.