u/Aventura_Industries

After dragging my feet for over a year, I finally beat BOTW the other day and found a cheap used copy of TOTK, so I bought it. I initially planned to wait a bit, as I've heard that making an immediate jump can be jarring and even feel like taking a step backward, going from max stats and the muscle memory built up. I've been playing a lot of BOTW over the past few weeks, not just finishing my fight against Ganon and doing a ton of side quests and armor upgrades, but my girls are now into it, so I'm helping them out with a lot of early game shrines and divine beasts battles. I also just bought DK Bananza and plan on picking up Star Fox when it drops, so I figured that would hold me over for a month or two. Still, I decided to pop TOTK into the Switch 2 last night.

I'm only about 2 hours into the game and still in the sky island with only two abilities, but wow.

The quality-of-life improvements alone are so welcome. Being able to quickly scroll through and drop weapons, especially when opening chests and you are out of inventory slots, is so nice that I wish they had somehow included it in the DLC or Switch 2 upgrade for BOTW. I've got work to do to fight the muscle memory of opening up the pause screen inventory.

Load times - while the Switch 2 upgrade for BOTW definitely improved load times, TOTK is so much faster. I don't know if that's just a result of it being a newer game and the devs figuring out how to optimize things, and I have no Switch 1 TOTK frame of reference, but the handful of times I have seen the loading screen, it feels like it is flying by.

Recipes are definitely a welcome addition - being able to just quickly grab everything you need for a recipe without scrolling/sorting through a menu. Not a huge deal right now, being so early into the game, but I can tell how nice this will be later on.

Then there are the ultrahand and fuze abilities. I can already see how this is going to open the door to a wide variety of play styles, and I know my kids, in particular, are going to love building crazy structures or absurd weapon combos. I just went through my first cave, and I am about to learn how to make powered-up contraptions, so I'm looking forward to that.

Needless to say, I think I might end up playing straight through at this point, if for no other reason than to be "done" by the time my kids are fighting over a copy of the game.

Also, I'd appreciate any good tips or early game recommendations - whether it's specific quests or something else that will make the game more enjoyable quicker, not that it isn't already. For instance, I've seen a few posts suggesting maximizing hearts vs. stamina early on, which is the exact opposite of what I would recommend for newcomers to BOTW.

I've never really trusted the sticker-calculated club path metrics because my miss (in real life and on Square) is a dead pull caused by an over-the-top, out-to-in club path and a face that is square-to-closed relative to the path.

Yet the Square driving range will show an in-to-out path nearly every time, with a shot tracer that shows a shot with no curve heading left. These aren't snap hooks that start right and severely hook due to an extremely closed face relative to an in-to-out path. They are straight-up, dead pulls.

It almost feels like it's mirror-imaging the measurements. Because I can tell/feel that I'm coming over the top, and when it shows 8 degrees in-to-out, I feel like it's the opposite: that I am extremely over-the-top. Because my face is closed, the resulting image on screen mirrors what I would expect.

What's interesting is that if I swing very slowly in an exaggerated manner, coming across the ball from the outside to the left, it will correctly detect that as out-to-in. The moment I add speed, it's like it gets scrambled. Also, when I block a shot to the right, where I know I came from the inside with an open face (relative to path), the Square will correctly show what I feel with an in-to-out of 0-2 degrees.

I'm not sure if anyone else experiences anything like this. There are some older posts here that touch on this issue, but no real solutions. I'm wondering if it's something with my overhead room lighting (play in basement, no exterior/outside light). The LM is square to my target line/stance, and the fact that it can detect which direction the club is happening when I swing much slower suggests it's not an alignment issue.