By all appearancesThe Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdomlooks like it has every chance to be the standout phenomenon of this year. Launched a couple days ago, the game has had fans lining up for its release, forums ablaze with discussion, and a range of legacy media focusing their coverage on it.
The sequel to the critically acclaimed Breath of the Wild, which was recently crowned as the greatest game of all time in aGQ poll of experts, Tears of the Kingdom has been hailed as an even better experience, not least in our ownreview. Meanwhile, in a technical appraisal it’s been praised ashighly polished too, with very few bugs and glitches. This level of shine has fans aglow, but for fans of a certain other series it’s sort of rubbed salt in the wound. Yep, we’re looking at you Pokemon.
Related:The Legend Of Zelda: Tears Of The Kingdom Review - Take To The Skies
Pokemon Scarlet and Violet was one of last year’s best selling games and is considered one of the finest entries yet, in terms of its story and writing, but in certain other aspects it ran afoul. These aspects have dogged recent Pokemon entries and the technical performance of Scarlet & Violet tested the patience of critics and had fans in heated debate. A recent thread highlighted just how different the level of polish is between the Pokemon games and Zelda.
Is playing the new Zelda making anyone else real salty over the state of recent Pokemon games?
byu/daniel-mcainpokemon
Over on the Pokemon subreddit a recently upvoted thread asked, “Is playing the new Zelda making anyone else real salty over the state of recent Pokemon games?” The OP pointed out that some had defendedPokemon Scarlet & Violetby suggesting it was running up against the hardware limitations of the aging Nintendo Switch, but since Tears of the Kingdom expands on its predecessor and runs well on the console it’s evident that this defence might not hold much water.
“Yeah no secret Pokemon is really behind other games/series/franchises, but at the same time, none of them hold a candle to Pokemon’s popularity, so it’s a state of ‘why should we do better if we’ll always outsell those other games no matter what?'” wrote one user on the above thread, in a heavily upvoted comment.
Others said that Zelda has become very popular by dint of being excellent. “True, Zelda sells because it’s very good, Pokemon sells because it’s Pokemon,“agreeda commentor.
But others pointed out an important difference between the Zelda series and Pokemon. While the latter has had to launch new games on a much more frequent release cycle, the Zelda series is known for launching new entries much less frequently, with Tears of the Kingdom a case in point, since it’s been six years between it and Breath of the Wild. Polish might be expected from a game that’s had that long in development compared with the Pokemon games which seem to release almost annually. But overall, it might be better for Pokemon games to launch in a state of polish more in line with Zelda from now on.
