Current Events > Which game had better Shrines? BOTW vs TOTK

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I personally perfered the calming garden atmosphere and music of TOTK over the oppressive atmosphere of BOTW

BotW by far.

Bomb arrows pushing switches was a really bad design move in TotK.

BotW. Some of the TotK ones were a little messy. The new mechanics were cool, but didn't work like they should have sometimes.

Coming up with unorthodox solutions to shrines in TOTK was a ton of fun.

NGL I'm not a huge fan of building stuff in TotK

ZMythos posted...

Coming up with unorthodox solutions to shrines in TOTK was a ton of fun.

one of the biggest improvements over botw was this. In botw I enjoyed the powers, but they were pretty hyper specific in their uses and it meant that all shrines had one solution. But in totk, the only power that I didnt use constantly was the time reverse one, so there were fun creative ways to get through any tough shrines I couldnt figure out the right way to finish.

the entire idea was done and boring by the time TotK came out. i had almost no interest in solving 100+ shrines again. actually, that sentiment extends to most of TotK. i got bored of that game in like 20h.

That's a toughie. TotK allowed for more freedom in puzzle-solving, but BotW wasn't without flexibility in this regard either. TotK's aesthetics and music were a bit better, and didn't fall back on repetitive Tests of Strength. However, due to a number of gameplay changes in terms of weapons and treasure-hunting, the Shrine rewards in TotK were almost always dogshit.

I'd probably give the edge to TotK, but the terrible rewards alone made the contest neck-and-neck.

TOTK easy. Think there was only one bad shrine in that game. Had to look up a guide for it and nobody seemed to be sure if they were cheesing it or if that was the intended solution. Something about attaching different sized balls to roll down a kurved path and hit a target. I knew about the bomb arrow vs target trick, but I really wanted to figure out how to do it properly.

TotK easily. yea a lot of them you can cheat but at least it had a lot of variety.

BotW started off great and then just became a chore with so many being the same thing. so many were just fighting that battle robot. then even a lot of the puzzles after awhile felt way too similar. like out of the 120 shrines felt like it was more like half were unique. i'm sure after awhile TotK probably started to feel like that as well for some people but really didn't to me. i know i didn't 100% the shrines in BotW. not sure if i did in TotK but if not i got 90% at least

I think the mechanics of TotK generally felt better. Building weird shit for very specific situations was fun. Plus there's a lot of potential to ignore the telegraphed solution and do something even more wacky in almost every shrine in TotK.

Trying to make precise shots with Stasis in BotW was annoying and the motion control shrines were kinda finicky. Plus the Tests of Strength got old. But also BotW didn't have as many Blessing shrines, which were almost always disappointing in either game unless the process to open the shrine was actually interesting.

I guess I'd side with TotK.

masterpug53 posted...

and didn't fall back on repetitive Tests of Strength.

In TotK you have 30% of them being blessing shrines. Very fun to get a chest with a worthless reward when the only thing you did was swim like 10 feet.

TOTK.

Better mechanics, weird and wild solutions that sometimes feel like they shouldn't work but they do, etc.

Doe posted...

NGL I'm not a huge fan of building stuff in TotK

Same. It took longer to build a vehicle or platform (prior to getting Autobuild) to transport Koroks to their destinations most of the time that I just just ended up carrying them all the way with Ultrahand instead.

lucariopikmin posted...

In TotK you have 30% of them being blessing shrines. Very fun to get a chest with a worthless reward when the only thing you did was swim like 10 feet.

In both BotW and TotK you typically get a 'freebie' shrine when the method to unlock entrance to the shrine was challenging / in-depth enough to count as the shrine puzzle. I couldn't tell you what the exact number / ratio of freebie shrines is in both games, but I doubt it's different enough to say that one game clearly has an advantage over the other in this particular regard.

TOTK. BOTW gave you your tools immediately and then played with them relentlessly. Building stuff, while not at all what I wanted in a Zelda game, gave me some very humorous moments

TOTK for me. Theres often a correct solution the game wants from you, but its by no means the only way to win. I beat several shrines in ways i know the game wasnt specifically expecting me to

BOTW being less free meant most puzzles had one solution and that one solution only.

lucariopikmin posted...

In TotK you have 30% of them being blessing shrines. Very fun to get a chest with a worthless reward when the only thing you did was swim like 10 feet.

I actually preferred having those sprinkled in. They made a lot of shrines in TotK a lot more difficult and in depth to access, so it felt rewarding to just walk in and grab a quick item and be one step closer to an upgrade.

masterpug53 posted...

I couldn't tell you what the exact number / ratio of freebie shrines is in both games

It's around 25% in BotW with 120 shrines total and 2 freebies and 30% with 150 shrines in TotK and atleast 10 of those are complete freebies.

masterpug53 posted...

when the method to unlock entrance to the shrine was challenging / in-depth enough to count as the shrine puzzle

I definitely agree with that and I do prefer TotK over BotW because the shrines in general are better but I'm talking about the actual no effort shrines that do bring it down including the ones that are just bring the rock to the shrine since they're generally not that impressive to do.

So on average, TotK had better shrines if only because it didn't have so many combat shrines or non-shrines as BotW did.

But for the actual puzzle shrines, I think BotW was better. TotK gave you so much freedom that most shrines were pretty easy. Don't get me wrong, it's cool that the game gave the players so many tools for tackling a problem in a countless number of ways. But BotW's more restrictive powers made their puzzles inherently harder to solve.

Lotta interesting discussion in this topic! I was wondering what people prefered and it is way more divded than I anticipated!