Bill C-27 is a Bill in Canada that would replace the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA) with the new so called Consumer Privacy Protection Act (CPPA). It has passed second reading. This new law is worse than PIPEDA.
1 The Protections (or lack thereof)
CPPA offers less protection than PIPEDA. Under PIPEDA organizations are required to give purposes must be stated in such a manner that the individual can reasonably understand how the information will be used or disclosed. Under CPPA organizations still must give purposes, however they do not have to give individuals an understanding of the information will be used or disclosed.
This law introduces vague new exceptions to consent. These are the new exceptions (note de-identified means pretty much nothing. You can still be identified): Business Activities

18 (1) An organization may collect or use an individual’s personal information without their knowledge or consent if the collection or use is made for the purpose of a business activity described in subsection (2) and
(a) a reasonable person would expect the collection or use for such an activity; >and
(b) the personal information is not collected or used for the purpose of influencing the individual’s behaviour or decisions.
List of activities
(2) Subject to the regulations, the following activities are business activities for the purpose of subsection (1):
(a) an activity that is necessary to provide a product or service that the individual has requested from the organization;
(b) an activity that is necessary for the organization’s information, system or network security;
(c) an activity that is necessary for the safety of a product or service that the organization provides; and

>(d) any other prescribed activity. 

Legitimate Interest

An organization may collect or use an individual’s personal information without their knowledge or consent if the collection or use is made for the purpose of an activity in which the organization has a legitimate interest that outweighs any potential adverse effect on the individual resulting from that collection or use and
(a) a reasonable person would expect the collection or use for such an activity; and
(b) the personal information is not collected or used for the purpose of influencing the individual’s behaviour or decisions. Research, analysis and development 21 An organization may use an individual’s personal information without their knowledge or consent for the organization’s internal research, analysis and development purposes, if the information is de-identified before it is used. Information produced in employment, business or profession An organization may collect, use or disclose an individual’s personal information without their knowledge or consent if it was produced by the individual in the course of their employment, business or profession and the collection, use or disclosure is consistent with the purposes for which the information was produced. Employment relationship — federal work, undertaking or business 24 An organization that operates a federal work, undertaking or business may collect, use or disclose an individual’s personal information without their consent if
(a) the collection, use or disclosure is necessary to establish, manage or terminate an employment relationship between the organization and the individual in connection with the operation of a federal work, undertaking or business; and
(b) the organization has informed the individual that the personal information will be or may be collected, used or disclosed for those purposes. Financial abuse
34 An organization may on its own initiative disclose an individual’s personal information without their knowledge or consent to a government institution, a part of a government institution or the individual’s next of kin or authorized representative if
(a) the organization has reasonable grounds to believe that the individual has been, is or may be the victim of financial abuse;
(b) the disclosure is made solely for purposes related to preventing or investigating the abuse; and
(c) it is reasonable to expect that disclosure with the knowledge or consent of the individual would compromise the ability to prevent or investigate the abuse. Statistics, study or research 35 An organization may disclose an individual’s personal information without their knowledge or consent if
(a) the disclosure is made for statistical purposes or for study or research purposes and those purposes cannot be achieved without disclosing the information;
(b) it is impracticable to obtain consent; and
(c) the organization informs the Commissioner of the disclosure before the information is disclosed. Socially beneficial purposes
39 (1) An organization may disclose an individual’s personal information without their knowledge or consent if
(a) the personal information is de-identified before the disclosure is made;
(b) the disclosure is made to

 (i) a government institution or part of a government institution in Canada, (ii) a health care institution, post-secondary educational institution or public library in Canada, 

> (iii) any organization that is mandated, under a federal or provincial law or by contract with a government institution or part of a government institution in Canada, to carry out a socially beneficial purpose, or > (iv) any other prescribed entity; and >(c) the disclosure is made for a socially beneficial purpose. 

or Prevention, detection or suppression of fraud *Debt Collection *Records of historic or archival importance *Breach of agreement or contravention *2 Enforcement** CPPA's enforcement is similar to PIPEDA's but worse. At least there are penalties. The process: 1. An individual files a complaint with the OPC. There are several reasons which can the commissioner can use to not investigate but not talking to the organization first isn't one of them. 2. The OPC investigates during which the Commissioner may attempt to resolve a complaint by means of a dispute resolution mechanism such as mediation and conciliation, unless an inquiry is being conducted in respect of the complaint or try to enter a compliance agreement. There is not time frame for this. (note under PIPEDA, a report of findings must be issued within a year see my last post)). It doesn't really say what an "investigation" is. 3. If the matter is still not resolved or the commissioner believe a compliance agreement is being breach an inquiry will start. The Commissioner must make rules respecting the conduct of an inquiry, including the procedure and rules of evidence to be followed, and must make those rules publicly available. 4. After the inquiry, the commissioner must make a decision.

>(a) the Commissioner’s findings on whether the organization has contravened this Act or has not complied with the terms of a compliance agreement; >(b) any order made under subsection (2); >(c) any decision made under subsection 94(1); and >(d) the Commissioner’s reasons for the findings, order or decision. 

"Compliance order"
(2) The Commissioner may, to the extent that is reasonably necessary to ensure compliance with this Act, order the organization to

>(a) take measures to comply with this Act; >(b) stop doing something that is in contravention of this Act; >(c) comply with the terms of a compliance agreement that has been entered into by the organization; or >(d) make public any measures taken or proposed to be taken to correct the policies, practices or procedures that the organization has put in place to fulfill its obligations under this Act. 

This must happen within 2 years of the complaint being followed, except it might not, see my last post. 5. The commissioner may recommend a penalty be imposed. This seems irrelevant because of, 6. Appeals may be made by the complainant or respondent to the tribunal with respect to a finding made by the inquiry, an order made by the commissioner or the commissioner's decision not to recommend a penalty. You only have 30 days to go to court. Under PIPEDA you have a year. 7. The tribunal may impose a penalty for all the contraventions in a recommendation taken together is the higher of $10,000,000 and 3% of the organization’s gross global revenue in its financial year before the one in which the penalty is imposed. Those numbers are the maximum. The law sets out relevant factors. 8. You may sue for damages if a finding by the commissioner or tribunal has made a finding that the respondent has violated the act. This is done in federal court or the superior court of a province. 9. An order by the tribunal may be reviewed by the Federal Court. The judgment of the federal court may be appealed to the Federal Court of Appeal. The Supreme court may also take an appeal afterwards. This is much longer than PIPEDA and although there are fines, the protections are so weak that the fines barely matter.

I finished a very basic upgrade from a 4670k on ddr3 to a 7700x on ddr5 due to motherboard failure. I thought I would share a bit for those of you who are looking to do a similar thing as you may experience some of the issues I did regardless of the hardware you choose.
Hardware:
I kept my seasonic focus 650w ps as it is newer, two older HDDs and one sata. I also kept my zalman z9 neo case and my EVGA 1070 FTW. I will eventually upgrade the video but for now I just needed a working PC since my motherboard popped a few weeks back.
I spent a lot of time reviewing and looking at processors. I decided to go with the 7700x. I am still not 100% sure if I made the right choice, but the 13600k at the time was about $40 more expensive for the build. I was also a little worried about the power draw and heat. I was going to grab a 7700, but the 7700x was $20 cheaper, and I wanted to buy a slightly better cooler.
I grabbed a thermalright Frost tower 120 (ft120) because the PAs were out of stock and it was roughly the same design and price anyway. I grabbed 32 gigs of G.Skill Flare DDR5 6000 cl32 with expo, as the 6000 appears to be a the sweet spot for AM5. I was hoping to get cl30, but the cost was $10 more and I am not sure the performance would be worth it.
The motherboard was also a challenge. The AM5 mobos are expensive, but so are the intel ones. I was going to grab a b650m, but there were a number of complaints about coil whine and so I ended up grabbing a b650 x gamer ax. It is a decent no frills board, and based on tech spots review a good one for everything up and through a 7950x.
I also grabbed some mx-4 paste because it seems to be the goto paste (I wasn't sure how good the paste with the cooler would be), and an NVME drive to move my games to. I have Artic Silver 5 but it is many moons old.
Build:
Hardware assembly was pretty easy. The only issue I had was putting the fans on the CPU HS (they were just a bit of a pita because everything was tight). Everything else was fine.
First boot was a no go. I knew power was fine because all my fans ramped up including the vid card. However, I had the red VGA light on my the mobo and a black screen. I hook up to the chipset display port and I got into the bios. So I was wondering if I had a bad vid card, but I did not.
This next part took me a good hour or more to figure out. Basically the bios showed no boot drives available, yet showed all of my drives hooked up and working. Previously, I had upgraded to windows 10, and apparently times have changed and most systems now use a GPT file system, where as mine was an MBR based boot drive. The motherboard is set to boot into GPT by default and would NOT boot on a legacy MBR system. So it took me a long time to figure that out and how to turn on legacy support mode.
I also learned that the AMD processors video does not appear to support Display port out with legacy mode enabled. So after I enabled legacy support I was back to a black screen again. I reset the bios and researched until I found that I had to switch back to my 1070 in legacy mode. So I re-enabled legacy mode, switched back to the 1070 and finally everything fired up.
Win 10 then found all my hardware and redid all the drivers. In order to fix the legacy mode issues I had to download a MS utility called MBR2GPT which converted my boot drive to the new format without losing any data. Then I had to go back to the bios and reset everything back to default.
It now booted fine in normal mode except I still had the red vga light on my mobo lit. So after much research I found that some of the older cards require a DP bios update to support 1.3 and 1.4. Nvidia has a checker that will update your card if needed and walla! the light went away. Now everything seemed to work the way it was suppose to.
I then enabled expo in my bios and it found the ram timings right away and fired it up exactly as specc'd with no issues. The system boots very fast and both the proc and the ram were running at rated speeds.
I then ran cinebench and found myself staring at expected performance, but right at a 95 temp on the die (the actual cores were less). Disappointed there, and not sure why but at least there was no thermal throttling and it ran just fine, but stayed really close to that 95.
I then went back into the bios and under PBO put in the values for eco mode. This was pretty easy and a very cool setting as my single core performance remained completely unchanged and my multicore performance dropped to 7700 levels, yet my temps plummeted to 68c. So I kept that.
My final hurdle was fan curve. The default fan curves are bad and the FT120 will ramp up and down quickly because the AMD processor temps apparently spike quickly when initially engaged before settling to normal. Once past about 65% the FT120 starts to get loud. So I put in a linear curve that is at 30% normally until 40c and then matches temp for temp up to 80c where it then ramps to 100% by the time it hits 90c. Gaming I stay around 65 and I idle around 40.
Overall, I am pretty happy, though I am still not sure I made the right processor choice, but I like that I can consider throwing in a 8800x3d or 9800x3d in a few years (probably won't do it though).
Performance is excellent and my 1070 is doing just fine with most games these days with a few tweaks downward in quality I still can play what I want.
Power wise my 650 is more than enough especially with my 7700x in eco mode.
I will say I am still not sure why the FT120 doesn't do as well at full load when not in eco mode in cinebench, but I am not likely to use non eco mode anytime soon and maybe someday I will try to tackle it.
I hope some of what I have done can help a few of you who experience similar issues, but overall the system is running incredibly smooth and basic performance is incredibly enhanced. I do have a few windows issues to work out but those have nothing to do with the hardware and everything to do with MS family SUX.

Last year, I got a quote to replace my roof from a local roofing contractor. I paid a deposit of over half the total proposed price. Later, the owner of the roofing company decides that he can't honor his quote. I told him that I would post negative reviews detailing my experience with his company if he did not honor his quote. He proceeded to cuss me out over the phone and told me that he would not refund my money until I signed a non-disparage agreement that would legally prevent me from telling my story. I refused. Instead, I filed a complaint with the Illinois Department of Finacial and Professional Regulations (the state agency that regulates contractors). After months, the owner finally gave the money back. But before that I had posted several 1-star reviews on Google. Apparently, there's a rule that prevents me from posting multiple reviews and all of the reviews taken down by Google. Now, Google has blocked me from posting any more reviews of this company.
I suspect that the company is paying Google to reject negative reviews of any kind. I know people who say they've tried posting negative Google reviews of this company, but they were all unsuccessful.
All I want to do is let other potential customers know that this company's owner is dishonest, and he won't honor his company's proposals. That's all... They need to be warned. If I had been warned, I would have avoided this company all together.
The company is Roberts Restorations, Inc. in Antioch, Illinois

I know there are a million posts here like this but after researching (or trying to!) for weeks now I still feel like I'm at square one trying to find a decent mattress.
I'm 6'2", 175 lb and my wife is 5'3", 115 lb. We both like firm support but a soft pillow or euro top to prevent shouldehip pain, and we both want a "cool" feel.
5 years ago we got a Nest Bedding Hybrid Latex (Queen Medium Firm). It was AWESOME and we loved it... until it began to sag after only three years. By year 4 we had back pain daily and researched to replace it.
Last December I fell for all the fake DreamCloud reviews out there and bought the DreamCloud Premier. We were surprised how stiff it felt but figured it would soften. It didn't of course, DreamCloud just plain ol' sucks. So I called to return it and they talked me into trying a topper first, which I've been sleeping on for the past month but it's HOT and uncomfortable and my back hurts. So we'll get the full refund if they stand behind their warranty. Just a horrible mattress.
So after reading this sub I now know to avoid mattresses in a box. Been shopping at several local stores in Los Angeles and have found several queen mattresses in the <$2500 range that I liked... but we can either find no reviews at all for some (Briganti Victoria) or no actual details about the quality of materials (even when we ask salespeople or call manufacturers directly).
We liked the feel of these:

1. Briganti Victoria Medium Euro Top (locally made in Escondido for Mattress Central) $1649
   
2. Beautyrest Black L-Class Medium (pillow top) $2135
   
3. Kingsdown Northwood plush $1805 at Sit n' Sleep
   

and one really nice one exclusively at Ortho Mattresses, but they have such horrible customer service reviews (and BBB complaints) I'm avoiding that store altogether now.
Finally today I said SCREW IT, WE'RE GETTING THE SUPER EXPENSIVE AIRELOOM M1 PLUSH, which we ignored because it was out of our price range. Lowest price I've found is $3600, but I thought a splurge would be worth it.
I checked this sub for Aireloom reviews just in case I was missing any warnings and YOU GUESSED IT lots of you guys say Aireloom feels great but breaks down after only 1-3 YEARS!!
So now I'm back at square one and feel like I'm going crazy. Why is it sooooo difficult to find a decent mattress that will actually last 8-10 years?
Thoughts? Advice?

https://www.toledoblade.com/news/religion/2023/05/28/controversial-pastor-epworth-united-methodist-rebuild/stories/20230514024
A church doesn’t just implode overnight.
At Epworth United Methodist Church, founded in Toledo in 1894, members felt they lost power to their pastor years ago.
The sudden March closure of Epworth Preschool was the boiling point for concerns that had been simmering since the first formal complaint against then-pastor Stephen Swisher was filed in 2021.
Two years and a wave of recent filings later, Mr. Swisher left the church on May 1. Bishop Gregory Palmer of the West Ohio Conference of the United Methodist Church confirmed that Mr. Swisher voluntarily withdrew from ministry in the UMC and is no longer a United Methodist pastor.
The Ottawa Hills church is the largest United Methodist congregation in the Toledo area, though members said regular attendance has declined in light of recent disputes surrounding the preschool and church leadership.
Mr. Swisher said in an April 23 interview that his decision was not related to the divisions within the church surrounding the preschool. He did not return phone calls and emails requesting additional comment.
Parents and congregants, however, say they see a correlation.
“Technically he's voluntarily leaving because the other option is he had to go to trial,” said Chase Peavy, a former Epworth Preschool parent.
Under the UMC Book of Discipline, if a formal complaint is filed for a chargeable offense, the bishop must conduct a review and implement a resolution.
“If a clergy person chooses, at any point, to withdraw from The United Methodist Ministry, the authority of the church ceases,” the bishop said in an email. That means the UMC can no longer adjudicate the complaints.
Formal complaints
In 2021, a group of members sent a formal complaint backed by 98 signatures to Bishop Palmer, alleging “misconduct or unsatisfactory performance of ministerial duties” of Mr. Swisher. He arrived at Epworth in April, 2020, and restructured church leadership that November.
One complaint, sent on Nov. 10, 2021, “challenge[s] the legitimacy” of a Nov. 12, 2020, meeting that served as a charge conference.
The United Methodist Church instructs that churches hold an annual charge conference, which directs the church mission, budgets, and elects council members. Church members are to be notified of the time and place of a charge conference at least 10 days in advance through at least two means of communication, according to the Book of Discipline.
The complaint states that many church members were unaware of the charge conference because it “had not been announced in the Tower [newsletter], weekly bulletin, or by mail.”
Cindy Franklin, a former office staff member of 13 years, was acting communications manager during the fall of 2020.
“I am the sole person that wrote, printed, and published all publications and I was told specifically to REMOVE ANY WORDING of ‘Charge Conference’ from all publications,” Ms. Franklin wrote in an April 10 formal complaint to Bishop Palmer.
The meeting was instead marketed as a Thursday evening service with then-district superintendent Scot Ocke as the guest speaker, according to the November, 2020, issue of the church newsletter. The December issue offers a “charge conference update,” listing issues that were voted on, including “Lay Leadership Teams/Action teams alignment and assignments.”
Ms. Franklin said Mr. Swisher dismantled a few volunteer committees and rebranded the remaining ones as action teams. She was one of an estimated 50 individuals who had been removed from a committee position. Mr. Swisher also handpicked his personal leadership team, narrowing a 54-person administrative council to a 13-person leadership team, Ms. Franklin said, noting that “every change since then is null and void because the way he got his leadership is inappropriate.”
Epworth staff declined to comment on the record.
“The November 2021 complaint was dismissed after a plan was implemented,” Bishop Palmer wrote in a statement. “The concerns in the complaint were addressed. They included but were not limited to deploying Annual Conference staff with particular skills to assist Epworth staff and congregation in dealing effectively with some internal matters.”
Lynne Saunders, who’s been an Epworth member for around 15 years, said the conference’s response was to “send in a team to coach [Mr. Swisher] and leadership on how to treat people.”
In August, 2022, letters were sent to District Superintendent Amy Haines with concerns related to Epworth Preschool finances and leadership.
The silence from UMC leadership in response to these messages, Ms. Saunders wrote in a Nov. 20, 2022, email to Ms. Haines, was “deafening.”
A number of letters and formal complaints, one of which attached 90 additional documents and exhibits, were again sent to the conference in March and April, following the sudden March 9 firing of director Jane Lyon and March 10 closure of Epworth Preschool.
Two complaints have been filed with the Ohio Attorney General, dated March 24 and April 27, alleging potential fraud and potential solicitation, according to the obtained documents. The office could neither confirm nor deny whether an investigation is or could be underway.
The United Methodist Church requires an annual audit of each of its churches. Bishop Palmer said in his joint statement with Ms. Haines that a 2022 audit is in the process of being conducted by an outside firm.
Epworth Preschool
Former members of the preschool board, which was abruptly disbanded in August, 2022, say $110,000 of preschool money is unaccounted for. They shared some financial documents with The Blade.
“It’s always been about the money, control, and power of the money,” said Ms. Saunders, who was preschool board chair.
Multiple members of Epworth’s staff declined to comment on the situation at the preschool.
Records show that the school’s account balance at the end of calendar year 2021 was just more than $63,000. Melinda Davis, former school board treasurer, said statements not provided to the board until the summer showed a starting balance of $0 for January, 2022. The account balance at the end of 2022 was $47,000, she said, with a starting balance of $0 in January, 2023.
Not seeing the money in the preschool account indicated it had been absorbed by the church, Ms. Davis said. For 40 years, the preschool had had a separate bank account from the church.
Surplus money would typically carry over to the next year, Ms. Davis said. The surplus was higher than usual these years because of federal COVID relief grant money that Epworth Preschool received through the Ohio Department of Jobs and Family Services. She said the grants were $22,500 in 2020, $13,000 in 2021, and nearly $23,000 in 2022.
“It is a CRIME to use federal educational grant money (which the director secured for use in the preschool) for anything but education,” a former church member wrote in the March 24 complaint to the attorney general.
In the summer of 2022, board members needed to see the school’s finances in order to make the budget for the coming school year. Ms. Saunders said she “demanded” the church turn over the records, which board members hadn’t received from the church since that January. A staff member informed Ms. Saunders and Ms. Lyon over the phone that the preschool monies were being absorbed into the church money, Ms. Saunders recalled, noting that it was never communicated in writing.
On Aug. 16, preschool board members received an email stating that Epworth’s leadership team had voted the night before “to dissolve and disband the Epworth Preschool Board, effective immediately.”
Because the board was dismantled, the email stated, Ms. Lyon was elevated to report directly to Mr. Swisher. Epworth memos to the parents state Mr. Swisher did not fire Ms. Lyon, and parents have received inconsistent messages regarding why Ms. Lyon was fired.
Ms. Lyon could not be reached for comment.
The church confirmed it is working toward reopening the preschool for the fall.
Parents confirmed they have received refunds for the remainder of the spring as well as their deposits for the coming fall.
Many former Epworth families are turning to Olivet Lutheran Church’s preschool in Sylvania, which is opening a new class for the fall to fill a need it saw in the community.
“We had people on a waitlist and then when [Epworth] families started calling, we saw the greater need for the whole community to open up another class,” said Olivet Christian Nursery School director Jennifer Crooks. “We're here to support them as new Olivet families.”
Epworth Preschool’s closure has allowed familiar faces to become friends, as parents came together both to seek truth and to plan daytime activities for their kids.
“This has been something in the right direction,” parent Christina Gondol said while one of her two sons and several other kids were in a group tutoring session.
Good has also come out of this, she added, in preventing a similar situation from happening in another community.
“If they would have gotten [Mr. Swisher] removed two years ago, they would have pushed him to another church,” Ms. Gondol said. “It had to come to this to get him all the way out.”
Healing and looking ahead
Members who had stepped away from Epworth started to come back on May 7, the first Sunday since Mr. Swisher left, according to the Rev. Stephen Bennett, who will serve as interim pastor through the end of June. He’s been attending and volunteering with the church for four years.
Pastor Bennett said there’s new excitement and positivity.
Epworth will augment its leadership teams with additional members, Pastor Bennett said, and is looking to rebuild some of the “previous committees that had been dissolved.”
He added that transparency is a “major goal” and acknowledged that “it’s been pretty opaque.”
Ms. Saunders said Epworth leadership must disclose information from the past three years in order to regain individuals’ faith in the church.
“The future of Epworth will be determined by what is revealed of the time Epworth was led by [Stephen] Swisher and the actions of those around him who had the power and responsibility to stop his misdeeds,” she wrote in an email. “Anything less will be fateful.”
As communication opens up, Pastor Bennett said, the congregation can begin to heal.
“Healing means coming back together,” Pastor Bennett said. “We’re going to get to work, and I think as people see their church returning to what they experienced previously that brought them there, that healing will begin to take place.”

I see all these people getting a green card in 60 days!!! I put my application in June 11 2021. They have been actively reviewing my case since April 11 2022. Should I cancel my application and start over? I talked to an agent on the phone and they said I can put in a formal complaint on Nov 9 2023, but as of now my application is still within acceptable processing time. It seems so scary to cancel it because I have waited so long. What would you do?

Yo! I made a post reviewing the Dark Tournament and everything before it here, so lets talk about Chapter Black! Feel free to skip any sections you're not interested in! The first section is about Yu Yu's power systems! Also, this should be clear, but everything in episode 95 and before will be spoiled here.
By the way, why did nobody tell me this arc was so long?! I somewhat joke, but this has ended up perhaps longer than my post on the Dark Tournament. www

YU YU HAKUSHO'S POWER SYSTEM PROBLEM(And how Togashi solved it!)

So, for the arcs before this one, the power system of Ki has been somewhat frustrating. It didn't ever make me go "bleugh, i hate this power system!", that'd be silly, alot of great moments come from both Yoki and Reiki users. However, I do feel they held the story back in some ways! Soft power systems are.. not my faves. Seemingly, you can do virtually anything with the cost of aura. Training methods are never really defined, and when mentioned, they're 'mentioned' at most. Abilities of Ki users have no specific limitations except when thrown on with sudden explanation.
So, I love Territories! We're introduced to them with the three schoolboys, Kido, Kaito and Yanagisawa.. in order, they're the users of Shadow, Taboo and Copy! I love Kido and Kaito, though Yana didn't really get much focus in the story so I have no particular interesting in him outside of hairstyle and ability! Kido and Kaito on the other hands are fun, charismatic characters with awesome Territories! Kido is voiced by DIO, so that's another plus.
Kido's Territory is simple. His Territory is shadows. He can control his own shadow's movements, and if he steps on your shadow, you've entered his Territory, freezing your body in place. This is just fucking cool.
Yana's Copy Territory is cool, but not really notable. It was neat and was used well, it's just very limited. Though, in the final battle, I don't really see why he didn't copy Yusuke or Hiei; easily their strongest party members, and help out. Plot hole? maybe. Narrative convenience? certainly.
Kaito's is probably my fave Territory in the entirety of Chapter Black. Taboo makes a certain radius around him his Territory, inwhich violence is impossible! He sets the Taboo word, and if either he or anyone inside his Territory speak the Taboo, they lose their soul! Generally speaking, this was probably my one of my fave fights in all of Yu Yu Hakusho.
Strategic, skill-based, not about raw numbers.. A fight of intellect. Rad as fuck. Though, It really did sadden me that it was never used more than once! I'd love to see more Taboo battles. It's unfortunate Kaito never got to fight again. Theoretically he could defeat Sensui himself! I don't get why they didn't send him in in the final battle. I get it's total protagonist syndrome, where only the protags are allowed to fight the final boss, but c'mon. That only makes sense from a meta-perspective! In-universe, there's really no excuse. atleast we got several instances of good use out of Copy, but not using Taboo more than once? It's sad.
So, now that we've got through the first Territories we've met, what does this teach us? 1. there's always a bigger fish. Just because Yusuke is the strongest man on earth, doesn't mean he can't be defeated. After an antagonist like Toguro younger, it's hard to imagine who Yusuke could fight next. This is a genius way of implementing it. Raw power is no longer the way. 2. humans can now fight without any prior experience, as that hole opening is causing humans to gain Territorys. This is great for introducing new antagonists and supporting cast members. 3. Territories don't give the user raw stats! Users of Reiki and Yoki have their raw stats (ATK, DEF, AGI, MP, HP, ETC) increase the stronger they get. This is bad for a long narrative, as your characters will keep rising to new limits, making it harder to add stakes to a conflict, or add in new, strong, amazing guys.
This is the very reason that Togashi's next battle shounen manga had a power system that, while similar to Ki, has additional classes, rules, regulations and systems to it, because he learned from this narrative mistake. With Territorys, a user has only as much ATK, DEF, AGI or HP as an average person, with no MP to speak of. Any Territory user could just die from a brick to the head, or being punched too hard that their skull hits the ground and splits, like a normal person. This ups the stakes of the battle, by equalising the forces. Their ability and intellect are their strongpoint, not raw numbers. after like 40 episodes of raw stat-based combat, this was an AMAZING narrative choice.
This is further seen with a boxer named Murota. His wiretap allows him to read the mind of anyone who enters his Territory. So simple, yet so good for a narrative. All the storytelling involving Murota's Wiretap are great, and his easy defeat when it comes to Yusuke coming in didn't even take away from his ability being interesting. Sorry buddy, for a Boxer, you didn't get a offensive ability at all.
This is all of the introductory Territory, so i'll leave this section here. The other Territories and my thoughts on them will be covered along with their connected character. Though, I will leave you with one thought.. Togashi, All the women in your narrative are virtually identical visually speaking, get barely anything to do, and Genkai, the only one with a character arc and her own great story gets it reversed by the end of the Dark Tournament Arc..
atleast give us a W by giving Keiko a Territory! this way, the LEADING WOMAN of your story could join in the plot without ANY training required.. Like come on, what the hell. All women seem to do in Yu Yu Hakusho is act as someone to project and care for by their man. It's kinda gross. Atleast we have Genkai, but come on..

CHAPTER BLACK & YOKAI CLASSES!

Soon after the initial plothook, we learn we were tricked into thinking these guys were the plot! Gotta love Genkai lol. I love that she continues to teach Yusuke in such a way. Moving on, though, ignoring Sensui and the gang for now, Chapter Black! a GREAT concept! Is it a bit on the nose? Yes, of course. But we must remember Yu Yu Hakusho is aimed at young children, so we can forgive this, since it's really well written anyway!
Togashi would go on to perfect his writing about this theme in Hunter x Hunter, but that doesn't mean it's not amazingly done here! It makes perfect sense that Chapter Black would exist, and doesn't seem contrived, there's nothing negative I can really say about it. How it effected those who saw it tells enough, so I don't have to tell you about it!
So, before the introduction of Chapter Black, the tape itself, we learn about another thing that definitely existed this whole time! (I'm just being sassy, nothing wrong with introducing new concepts.) Yokai classes! At the beginning of the anime, Kurama and Hiei were lowly D-listers at the beginning of the anime, so their rise to power is quite unexpected, now being B-listers! By the end of the arc, they both reach A class! Good for them good for them.
The revelation that Toguro younger was only a B class is great. Really gave me a "Oh my god!" moment. The class system is very much serving the same purpose as scouters, to make us go "woah!" at how strong an enemy is to impress us, and to impress us even further when our Yokai protagonists, Hiei, Kurama, and later Yusuke are when they reach a higher level! It's simple but effective. Though, later, in my own opinion, this will have negative repercussions on the plot. But we'll get there at the end of this post. For now, they're good in my book! You'll see why my thoughts change later, and why I think they were a mistake in the long-run.
Also, a smaller note, some interesting foreshadowing. At the end of the arc, Shinobu notes that Kurama, as Yoko Kurama, was once an A class Yokai.. but he also mentions that Hiei used to be A class aswell?! Obviously, this is going to be expanded upon later. I'm interested to see why he dropped to D later!

INTRODUCTION OF BLACK ANGEL & SNIPER! THE FIGHT WITH DOCTOR..

Okay, now we're back to Territories and the plot! Sorry, we were stuck in the 'mechanics' zone for a while, weren't we?! So! First, we meet Sensui himself. Later, we learn this is one of his alters, Minoru. Ominously, he stares at Yusuke and the gang, and has Sniper shoot an eraser to intimidate, and lure them into a trap at the hospital! From this, we can already tell he's intelligent.
Here, he expected Yusuke to follow him so he could dispose of Yusuke, but Yusuke kept surprisingly cool thanks to Genkai's preparation she put them through. It's kinda fucking crazy to imagine that Yusuke, if he followed Sensui, he would of been quickly killed by Minoru and Sniper. Doctor would then of disposed of the users of Shadow, Copy and Wiretap. Can you imagine how the plot would of gone from here if Yusuke made this singular choice?! I love when a story has so many single choices that could change EVERYTHING. it's really entertaining to think about.
So, Wiretap's user gets taken to the hospital, but they learn that Doctor is about! Doctor Kamiya is a fun character, simple but effective, I really like him. So far, Yusuke has murdered countless evil Yokai, but to kill an evil Human? It's very different. In the end, Yusuke does kill Doctor, but Genkai revives him by restarting his heart, saying that Yusuke needs not the death of a man on his conscious. I really like this moment.
The entire fight was super entertaining and everyone got something to do! ..Well, except Keiko. Togashi, why'd you make her go there?! C'mon man.. This is probably one of the best fights in Yu Yu Hakusho. I love that Kido and Wiretap and Copy's users do alot to aid Yusuke in this fight! It really feels like a group effort.
On the Territory front, Doctor Kamiya's is cool! Generally speaking, doctor powers are always super cool. A Reiki scalpel, creating diseases with his mind, perfect surgery skill.. his Territory being the diameter of a Hospital, it's so fun. It's a cool limitation too, all these abilities, but he can only use them inside of a Hospital setting. Territories allow for such awesome limitations.

SEAMAN, KUWABARA'S AWAKENING! KOENMA'S MORALITY..

Seaman! It's a great conflict, not much else to say! Mitarai is a great character, and his Territory is cool! Really, I already talked about Mitarai through subtext in the 'Chapter Black & Yokai Classes!' section. Though I will say, UNLIKE WITH KEIKO, using this opportunity to unlock a new power for a HUMAN we've known for a long time, Kuwabara, is really clever! Him being the one who can cut open the field is the LAST THING I expected, it's great.
Though, this introduction of Seaman; Mitarai, will come back as a negative later! the Chapter Black arc introduces alot of great concepts and characters early on, but suffers for it in the late game is something I notice. Much like Yokai Classes that I mentioned earlier, this is something you'll wanna 'bookmark' in your mind, as later on I will explain my problems with Mitarai's usage later in the story! Just know that for now, I think his story position is great, aswell as his character itself. This poor kid was used by Sensui who held Chapter Black as the reason why Mitarai should join him in hating humanity.
So, around here is where we learn about Shinobu's past. So, throughout the early story, I didn't like Koenma much. I didn't DISLIKE him or anything.. he was just kinda a joke character in a serious role, which isn't a bad thing. But here, they really flesh him out.
Now, at the beginning of the story, Koenma uses Yusuke, a boy with an inferiority complex who's had fighting as the only thing he's good at, as a child soldier, sending him to what is basically war. Koenma even out-loud admits in the Chapter Black arc that he chose Yusuke because unlike Shinobu, he's not an independent thinker. Essentially, he's easy to use, with the idea being grooming him into the perfect child soldier for Spirit Realm's desires.
We the audience realize this is bad from the beginning of the story, and we all knew that Koenma was a bad person, but them saying out loud was rather surprising! Alot of battle shounen try to sneak this under the rug, like Naruto and My Hero Academia. Admitting that the morality of the adults in your story is corrupt for sending children to murder others and endanger themselves? Pretty ballsy!
and hey, Yusuke has murdered tons of Yokai up to this point, all of which deserved to die, but making a child do this is the immoral part. Something I enjoy about Yu Yu Hakusho is that all our characters can be rather grey at times. This is something Togashi perfects later in Hunter x Hunter. But for now, we have characters of questionable morality like Hiei and Kurama in our supporting cast.
Yusuke hasn't done anything immoral, but he's murdered plenty of people without remorse, and threatened to do as such to those he doesn't like by the end of the arc (the forces that King Enma sounds down at the end of the arc). Kuwabara is the only one who's truly morally clean when you think about it. Though, by the end of the arc, even he makes an immoral choice, which is fun. None of our protagonists are morally perfect, and I think that's great.

SHINOBU'S PAST!

^{To note, I will be talking about Sensui's Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID} here. While we didn't learn about it at this point in the part, it seems like the most logical place to talk about it since it originates from his past, like anyone with DID. I do not have DID myself, so I cannot say if this is a good or bad representation of it. However, I can say that from what I know, it's very well researched. If anyone with DID has thoughts on this representation, I'd love to hear them.)
So, Shinobu, a human born with incredible Reiki. Probably equivalent to a low B-class Yokai in his youth. For reasons unknown to him, Yokai saw his incredible Reiki and targeted him. Why did these mysterious creatures that only he could see aim to kill him? He didn't know. Being a child, naturally, he comes to the conclusion. "I didn't do anything to them, and they're trying to kill me. Yokai are evil, Humans are the good guys."
Eventually, Koenma sees this kid, and is like "it's free real-estate.", choosing to use this kid for his own gain, grooming him into a child soldier and putting him into far more dangerous situations than he would of entered otherwise. As you know, Shinobu Sensui enters a young Black Black Club and witnesses humans being far worse than any Yokai he's ever seen. This sight likely tortures him for the rest of his life in his dreams, so that's fun.
This young man, filled with justice, decides he was completely wrong, and 180's his perspective. Yokai are free and honest creatures. Humans are the evil ones. This awful past, and this traumatic moment in his life, are what form his modern perspective, formed the alters in his system to cope with the trauma, and inspired him to steal Chapter Black and go into hiding for 10 years soon later.
Surprisingly, Sensui Shinobu does not develop one evil personality who controls the 'real Shinobu', like the old trope goes. Togashi here shows a fairly realistic depiction of DID, with alters of different age, gender and personality.
Considering we later learn about Itsuki, the gay man who loves Sensui, and both this and DID are treated really well, it really makes you wonder why the women in Yu Yu Hakusho are treated so badly when mental illnesses and homosexuality are treated with respect, lol. You were so close Togashi! now if only you treated Transgender people and women better.. well, he learns to treat both these groups better in his later works, so I can't really complain. I forgive you, old man. We'll speak about each of Sensui's identities later when they're introduced!

YUSUKE VS SENSUI! DEATH IN YU YU HAKUSHO..

Sniper fires a 'bullet', attempting to kill Mitarai! Yusuke runs down and fights Sensui way earlier than i'm sure any of us expected! Minoru and Yusuke's fight is one to behold, his leg-based fighting style is rad! Though, it's quite unfortunate that I don't have much to say about this brilliant exchange? I suppose with fighting, being such a visual thing, it's hard to talk about it. But what ends up happening as you're aware is that Black Angel, Gourmet and Gamemaster kidnap Kuwabara, the only one who can cut up that field; the barrier! We get a rad chase scene where Yusuke, with his super physicality thanks to his incredible Reiki, chases them down on a bike despite them driving a car!
This entire sequence is great. By the way, so far, Kurama hasn't done much this arc, and nor has Genkai. really makes you wonder why either of them didn't die in the Dark Tournament arc. Sorry to bring this up, but I just really don't like fake character deaths! Atleast Kuwabara's new Territory is a major plot-thread.. Kurama saved Keiko and Kuwabara elder, who shouldn't of been there in the first place and defeated Kaito's Taboo.
Genkai set up the boys to kidnap Yusuke and fight the gang, and that's it. I love what they did in this arc so far, but it's so little to justify such impactful moments. Kurama, fine, I can accept it. His sacrifice was impactful, but it didn't really matter, but Genkai.. she's such a good character, reviving her like this really makes me go "wow, so nobody can die except the antagonist, huh.". You don't want the audience to see through the wall like that..

YUSUKE VS SNIPER!

At this point, every fight in the arc has been amazing. I can't help but think Togashi has perfected combat. Hagiri's Territory is truly masterful, his Territory is a certain range from his body. From this range, he can place several bullseyes on his target's body. Any object he makes physical contact with will chase his target until it hits one of these bullseyes! What I'm saying is this Territory is awesome, and the fight is amazing. Unfortunately, as I mentioned before, when it comes to a fight there's not much to talk about, haha. I loved it though! At this point it feels like every new fight is 'the best fight in Yu Yu Hakusho'!
Something I love is that this guy isn't even Sensui, but he almost killed Yusuke! He would of, if our lovely tsundere Hiei wasn't about! After defeating Sniper in one hit, Hiei gives Yusuke a figurative handjob and releases Yusuke's tension! Yusuke and Hiei strike a deal with a fun climax in the epilogue of this arc, and team up!
Finally, the gang all meet up, and enter the cave! The final dungeon! Genkai decides that it's best to send in a limited number of people. If they all enter at once, then if the first wave dies, the second wave has a chance! Well, I already voiced my my complaints about this choice, so whatever. I'm just glad Mitarai gets to go in! He has to resolve his character arc, afterall.

GAMEMASTER, GOURMET, AND MINORU..

The actual games weren't very interesting to watch, but I enjoyed Mitarai's development, aswell as Kaito getting frigging screen-time! The way Gamemaster is defeated is really sad, I like it alot. It really tore Kurama up to kill this child. Love it. Seeing how Sensui manipulated this poor little boy is crazy.
After the defeat of Gamemaster, we get to Gourmet! blah blah he wasn't defeated. I don't really like Kurama's fights, to be honest. He just kinda pulls something out of nowhere. It's like he can do anything at all but only once.
So, Gamemaster and Gourmet were kinda dips in quality.. but soon we're back to the stuff I like! Now, logic dictates that if only Sensui and Itsuki are left, we're either going to have a 2 V 4, or Itsuki has to be defeated first before the gang can fight Sensui together.
Logic also dictates that now that Kurama has had his moment to shine, defeating both Gamemaster and Gourmet, it's time for Hiei, who has been absent the whole arc, and Mitarai, who's character arc revolves around being free from Sensui's manipulative grasp, to fight!.. but logic has nothing to do with it! Itsuki has tamed a Yokai of sorts, and kidnaps the gang! So, Hiei, Kurama and Mitarai are reduced to reaction youtubers. Atleast Itsuki is an interesting character, his feelings for Sensui are really sweet.
So, the fight between Yusuke and Minoru begins! I love the twist on classic battle shounen conventions where Yusuke in ATK, DEF and AGI is stronger than Minoru. Minoru has superior skill and MP and HP, but that's about it! Essentially, if Kurama is a White Mage, and Hiei is a Red Mage, then Kuwabara is the Warrior. Meanwhile, Yusuke and Minoru are a strange hybrid class, a Black Monk; a Monk who has access to Black Magic. Yusuke is overwhelmed by projectiles, but eventually realizes that he'd lose the war of attrition, so he goes on the offense! the damage isn't too much, so he just takes it and punches the hell out of Minoru! Frankly, the charismatic, philosophical and manipulative Minoru is my fave of Sensui's System. But we're soon introduced to Kazuya!

YUSUKE VS KAZUYA

I love Kazuya! His personality is very outward, and he's vulgar! A great opposite to Minoru, who's not very straight-forward at all. I don't really get if his gun arm is made from his Reiki or a prosthetic. If it's a prosthetic, where did his hand go..? But well, it's a cool weapon, so I can forgive it. Later when Shinobu shows up he asks Itsuki for a spare hand, so I guess it's a prosthetic? It doesn't really matter, but it peeves me slightly lol.
Kazuya loves murder and torture, and gradually shoots the hell out of Yusuke! I love this guy. Suddenly, Koenma appears! He wants to take responsibility for his awful actions?! I LOVE this for Koenma's character. Instead of a character with a black presence throughout the story, his presence has become a grey! He's regretful of what he's done, and I appreciate that. Through this arc, it feels like Koenma and Yusuke form a friendship, so that's nice. poor Jorge tho, totally neglected lmao. But while I like Jorge, he doesn't really matter.
So, Yusuke had time to recover thanks to Kazuya and Koema's conversation (the conversation was great, by the way.) and swipes the Mafuukan from Koenma! This is in-character for the low-self esteemed boy, so yeah. Yusuke beats the shit out of Kazuya, which is fun, and Shinobu appears!

VS SHINOBU

Shinobu shows up, puts on a shirt, and reveals he has.. Sacred Energy; Seikoki. Now, I'm sure in the last arc this will be expanded upon, but this for now has no info that we know about it, except that not even Genkai could turn her Reiki into it. We learn that Shinobu's Seikoki is SO strong.. that he's equivalent to an S class Yokai. Bro. TOGASHI. this is WHY you introduced Territories, so this wouldn't happen!! come on man.. so guess what, he kills Yusuke?
Listen, it starts cool okay, like, this is looking back in hindsight. At first it was "OH MY GOD HE'S SO STRONG" and "HE BROKE YUSUKE'S ARM WITH A TOUCH". it was really cool! but narratively, this was clearly a mistake. here's the thing.. Sensui is a great character. he definitely could of came back later. hell, while we know the names and personalities of all his alters, we haven't even met them yet! We've only met three! He's such a complex character, but from here, everything in the climax feels cramped.
So, Yusuke dies, this awakens Kuwabara's Territory fully, and he cuts out of Itsuki's dimension. Kurama is so enraged that his body enters the Yoko form by itself, without his mind reverting. Hiei's power goes up to A Class on principle. This is cool, but here's the thing. We *all* know they can't win. Togashi has introduced power levels. Kinda crazy isn't it? Togashi introduced Power Levels (Spirit Class) from Dragon Ball AND Stands (Territory) from JoJo in the same arc! Territories are great because fighters can come from anywhere and don't rely on being powerful to win. Spirit Classes suck because they relegate power to 'my number (or in this case, letter) is higher, so I win.'
Kuwabara and two A-Class Yokai.. they can't win against a single S class. On the bright side, good character moment coming up! When Shinobu gets behind the barrier, Kuwabara without even holding back, knowing he's going to die and so are all humans anyway, cuts through it, letting swarms of Yokai soon kill all humans! This makes sense for Kuwabara, since he knows they're all doomed anyway. Hiei and Kurama don't try to stop him, none of them regret this choice, they want to die by Shinobu's hand, fighting to the death. That's their choice. They fight on into the Demon Realm and face certain death..!

A DEMONKIN AWAKENS..

So, we learn here, while Hiei, Kurama and Kuwabara fight Shinobu, Yusuke is reviving! His descendent was an S-class Yokai! The Yokai traits skipped about a hundred generations, and Yusuke inherited this gene! I think this is actually.. pretty great! It only makes sense, right? in the prior arc, Toguro had his life ruined my Yokai, so he became one. Toguro hates Yokai.
in this arc, Sensui saw humanity being totally evil, so he took the Yokai's side. In the end, he, the human, fighting for the Yokai, fights Yusuke, who becomes a Yokai to stop Sensui, the human. Thematically, this is the best way this could end, Yokai vs Human. Even if this stuff with Yusuke and Shinobu being S-Class sucks, but it is what it is, i love that Yusuke is a Yokai. Though, poor Kuwabara, he and Keiko are the only human characters that matter left lol.
Pheonix Puu looks soo fucking cool btw, love that design. I love that Yusuke has spikey teeth now, that's fun. so, Yusuke and Shinobu fight, and I realize.. Shinobu is the least interesting of Sensui's system? He's overpowered, kills random Yokai in the Demon Realm while fighting Yusuke.. does he even care about his own goal? It's weird man.
well, on the bright side of this shitty Dragon Ball fight, Yusuke's Yokai form he enters looks super cool! Great design, love it. so, Yusuke does his Goku thing that he's started doing since the Dark Tournament Chu fight and is unsatisfied with beating Sensui while not using his own power. Whatever. Itsuki explains that Sensui is sick for some reason. This was not well foreshadowed, but he had cancer or whatever. Koenma brang Gamemaster back to life, so that uh. good job removing a great moment of the arc from the continuity, Togashi. It's really true that only antagonists can die in Yu Yu Hakusho, huh!?
I like that Shinobu wanted to open the hole to the Demon Realm because he wanted to die there, though. A great repentance for his transgressions against Yokai-kind, and this being delivered to him by the strongest Yokai we've seen so far, Yusuke Uremeshi, is great. Itsuki takes away Sensui's corpse forever into the darkness, which is sweet.
So, the epilogue! i loved EVERYTHING about it. everyone's paths they took were great. I love Doctor and Sniper's especially! If I have one pet-peeve, it's that they cut Yusuke's hair, it looks so coool, imagine him with the school uniform on with the long hair and scary tattoos?! it'd look rad. come on, uremeshiiii--
thank you for reading! sorry it's so long! :P big arc lol.

Hi Everyone!
​
I'm hoping you can help me with a few questions. I'm in my mid-30's and really interested in getting a mid-face lift. Despite the reviews I've found, I really like Dr Mirza Firat's work ( to be fair most reviews are regarding his noses, but honestly every doctor I've searched has at least one complaint). Anyway, I'm no stranger to ps/fillelasers/etc. and I like the idea of a more minor lift early to keep results more natural. I'm also pretty thin (105) and work out, but I have some stubborn spots on my flanks and inner thighs I'm thinking of lipoing because they make me self-conscious in tight clothes. So with all that here are my questions...
​
Mid-Face Lift

• Does anyone have experience with his Firalift surgery? Reviews?
• Are there any doctors anyone recommends for a natural mid-face lift? I don't want the super dramatic Bella/cat eyes. I'm based in the US, but open to any good doctors.

Liposuction

• Has anyone had liposuction with Dr. Firat? Reviews? My logic was if I'm going to do the lift it would be nice to do them together.
• Are there any doctors that are recommended for skinny lipo? I don't want a BBL or fat transfer.

Thanks!

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HelioHire	Senior Data Scientist	Austin
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PJS of Texas, Inc.	Custodian	Austin
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Restore Hyper Wellness	Part-Time Nurse Practitioner - Texas	Austin
Jobot	Dialysis RN	Austin
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Recruiter Free Agent	Registered Nurse (RN)	Austin
Restore Hyper Wellness	Full-Time Registered Nurse- TX010	Austin
Senior Shield HomeCare	CNAs and Experienced Caregivers	Austin
KIPP Texas Public Schools	School Nurse	Austin
Texas Health Action	Nurse Practitioner or Physician Assistant (Central Austin)	Austin

Hey guys, here are some recent job openings in austin. Feel free to comment here or send me a private message if you have any questions, I'm at the community's disposal! If you encounter any problems with any of these job openings please let me know that I will modify the table accordingly. Thanks!

I searched this sub high and low for reviews on the differences between At the Beach, Coco Paradise, and Waikiki Beach Coconut and found lots of lovers of all three scents but no concrete comparisons. Sharing my thoughts in case it helps someone else decide which one(s) to get!
In a (coco)nutshell:

• At the Beach = fresh, sophisticated coconut with a touch of ocean and floral 🌊
• Coco Paradise = coconut after dark with some really deep, perfume-y notes 🥥
• Waikiki Beach Coconut = fresh, fruity, and fun daytime coconut with pineapple 🌴

I ended up getting At the Beach and Waikiki Beach Coconut and passing on Coco Paradise. My only complaint with these two is staying power, but I also feel like B&BW fans know what we're getting into and I welcome the opportunity to switch up my scent or layer throughout the day.
At the Beach is, IMO, the Coastal Grandmother of the bunch. She's fresh, light, and effortless. If there are sunscreen notes they are expensive sunscreen to my nose. I got the new packaging and it's so pretty. I love the copper accents on the shower gel and FFM and the texture on the labels.
To my nose, Coco Paradise was just too heavy for daytime wear and was giving heavy beach resort at night + 80's suntan oil vibes. This one wasn't for me personally but I'm kind of fickle about seasonality with my scents and wouldn't be surprised if I liked it on a day when it wasn't 80+ degrees out. 😅
Waikiki Beach Coconut is the one that surprised me most. I assumed she would be my least favorite but I was smitten at first sniff. I'm learning that fruity scents really pop on my skin and this one is basically like drinking a piña colada on a breezy yet sunny day.
In the Game of Coconuts everyone wins, but if I had to pick a favorite I would choose At the Beach!

My wife and I just returned from a 7-day trip on the Holland America Eurodam from Seattle to Alaska. At the top I will say Alaska is an absolutely must-do destination. Despite our issues with Holland America and the Eurodam, every single stop on the itinerary in Alaska brought at least one “wow” moment. Unfortunately, the ship and line we decided to sail with, the Holland America Eurodam, was a very disappointing experience. I will pre-apologize for the lengthiness of the review here. :)

ITINERARY - 7 Days - May 20-27

Seattle - At Sea - Juneau, AK - Glacier Bay, AK - Icy Strait Point, AK - Sitka, AK - Ketchikan, AK - Victoria, BC - Seattle
Overall, the itinerary was fantastic. Some of the stops felt a bit rushed, especially if you had to take a shuttle from the port, but we overall felt we had a decent amount of time in each port. The toughest back-to-back stops were the ones we arrived late, left late, but then arrived at the following port very early the next morning.
As I said above, Alaska should be on everyone’s bucket list. The views are indescribably beautiful, the people are extremely nice, and the stops felt very “authentic” as compared to some other cruise destinations we’ve visited. We will visit Alaska again. Some of our top picks at each stop:

• Juneau - Whale Watching with Harv and Marv's Outback Alaska (highly recommend), Mendenhall Glacier
  
• Icy Strait Point - 1300’ Gondola Ride (expensive, but absolutely worth the view)
  
• Sitka - Fortress of the Bear, Pel’Meni (Russian Dumplings), New Archangel Dancers, Russian Bishop’s House
  
• Ketchikan - The Great Alaskan Lumberjack Show, Creek Street Shops
  

SHIP

The Eurodam itself is a fine ship, and feels very “classic” in terms of styling. However, the overall space of the ship felt incredibly underutilized. The “Lincoln Center Stage” was completely unused for music the entire trip. The 1000-person auditorium generally sat empty, save for a couple of 30-minute shows per-day and a movie or two while in-port, and this starts getting into our issues with the ship.

On-Board Entertainment

Activities during the trip were practically non-existent unless you wanted to bid on an art piece or purchase jewelry or a watch. I understand that it’s kind-of Holland America’s “thing” to have a relaxed on-board experience, but even random movies in the auditorium during the day would help break up the monotony on longer sea days. The two trivia games offered were often packed to the brim on days with no “scenic” viewing.
There were also a few entertainment options we read about on this subreddit/advertised by Holland that were non-existent on the ship, such as the BBC Earth Experience or bringing guest speakers aboard to talk about Alaska. We had Park Rangers on our Glacier Bay day, but otherwise it was the Cruise Director reading from a 30-minute teleprompt script with accompanying slideshow for their version of “TED” talks each day - she was awesome, but not a replacement for a guest speaker or expert on the topic.
The evening shows, to put it bluntly, were bad. I know this is a common complaint about Holland America, but I didn’t realize how bad. The comedian Jill Kimmel was a nice change of pace, but my wife and I abandoned going to the nightly Holland-produced shows after Night 3.

Stateroom

Our stateroom was good to great. We had a verandah room on the 8th Deck, right under the Lido buffet. There was practically no noise, and the staff that tended to the room were incredibly nice and efficient. Room was cool, clean, and quiet.
The bed, however, was easily one of the worst beds we have ever slept on. I’m a very easy sleeper and I even had issues falling asleep on the bed - constantly waking up with back pain each day. The television in the stateroom was fine, but they did not allow you to change input sources and the TV remote was mostly non-functional; not a big deal, unless you’re struggling to find things to do on the ship…

Technology

Technology with Holland America is a serious dichotomy. Our embarkation process was EASILY the best and fastest we’ve had with any cruise line. They have facial recognition technology and we were at the port and onto the boat within 10 minutes. I’ve never seen anything like it - big props to HAL here.
Once on the boat, things aged very quickly. My wife and I both struggled the entire trip to keep a Wifi connection to the ship’s internal network, which is required to use the Navigator App. The Navigator App itself is quite buggy, fails to refresh, and sometimes just never loads. We relied on the room-delivered paper itineraries often to see what was going on for the day. I took both of our phones down to Customer Service and was told “that’s just what happens sometimes” and that there was no fix.
We purchased the “Internet at Sea” package prior to the trip to try and stay connected, and it connected maybe 2-3 times while we were underway. We used the connection a couple times in-port, but otherwise it was a huge waste of money. Neither of these problems have been an issue on any previous cruise for us - yes, the internet at sea is very slow, but it would stay connected, and the internal Wifi for other ships has never been at-fault. I asked Customer Service about a refund on the internet package and was told that since we pre-purchased and used a “significant amount of data at sea” (180MB by their count), we were not eligible for a refund.
We practically had whiplash going from one of the most technology-forward port experiences on embarkation and debarkation to a complete lack-of user facing technology for convenience on-board.

STAFF

The Eurodam’s staff were overall good. Highlights were our stateroom stewards, the various bar staff, and embarkation/debarkation staff members. Our stateroom stewards seemed to always be patrolling the hallways, super polite, extremely nice, and always willing to give a helping hand. We really couldn’t have asked for better staff to have with us.
The rest of the staff on the ship seemed very… uninformed. Asking a staff member where something was on the ship or what time something was happening (such as port arrival time) was often met with a confused look or “Please visit Customer Service”. I’m assuming this is likely due to a heavy turnover post-COVID, but it really seemed like much of the staff were passengers as much as we were.
The other odd thing about the staff is what I would call “parroting”. English is not the first language of the majority of the staff, which has never been a problem prior to this, as a misunderstanding would often have the staff ask us for clarification. On the Eurodam, however, the staff all seem to simply parrot back to you what you’ve said to them without any understanding which led to many confusing situations for both parties.
As an example, I once asked a Customer Service desk staff if they could process a document for me, we were a day late, so they couldn’t. “I cannot process this for you, sir.” No problem. Since I didn’t need the paper anymore I asked:

• “Ok, could you shred this document for me then?”
  
• “I’m sorry sir, I cannot process the document for you.”
  
• “Yeah, that’s fine, could you throw this paper away for me?”
  
• “Sir, I’m sorry, I cannot process the document.”
  
• “I know, I understand. I’m just asking you to dispose of the paper.”
  

Finally someone came from the back room, translated for him, and he took the paper and put it in the shredder under the desk. This was a super minor thing, but it happened over-and-over again - the staff acting like they understood what was being said, but seemingly not actually comprehending it. Learning a language is incredibly difficult, and I have zero issues repeating myself, nor do I get upset by it, but it almost seemed like the staff were directed to fake understanding as it happened with multiple staff across the ship. This especially was an issue with the dining staff, which gets us into the biggest issue on the ship.

FOOD SERVICE

I’m not entirely sure where to start with this one. Food service was simply awful from top to bottom. Our one highlight was eating at Tamarind for one dinner.

Lido Buffet

Let’s start with Lido, the buffet. The space simply is not large enough for the number of passengers on the Eurodam. Every visit we had required us to hunt for a seat for 5-10 minutes before attempting to get our food. The buffet is not fully-mirrored on both sides, so it was a crapshoot as to which line would be longer on a given night. The space between the closest tables and buffet line was about 2 people across which made traversing Lido a chore at best - God help you if a mobility scooter ended up somewhere in the line. To be clear, it was never the person who required the scooter's fault, it's absolutely the poor layout of Lido.
The food in Lido was, in-general, bland, overcooked, and not visually appealing. There was a lot of overlap day-to-day of reusing similar cuts of meat for a slightly different dish. Often, there were dishes on the menu that just were never prepared or we were told was “out” despite never seeing it on the buffet early into dinner or lunch. The food also felt very cheap - I settled for a cold-cut sandwich a couple of times for lunch and the quality of the ham and turkey used would make an Oscar Mayer’s accountant blush knowing they could get away with selling it.
There were also very odd choices made about what you could and couldn’t do yourself at Lido. Get bread? Yes. Get a bagel? No. Cut bagel? Yes. Toast? No. Get jam? Yes. Get butter? No.

Room Service

Next up, room service. The combination of arriving at ports early and the general slowness of Lido had us ask for room service breakfast 5 times. The food never arrived on time, typically 30 minutes early or 15 minutes late. Not awful if you ask for a 7AM breakfast and it arrives at 7:15AM, but pretty rough when you ask for a 6AM breakfast and it arrives at 5:30AM.
The room service started making me second guess our food safety. We often would get cereal, milk, and yogurt of some sort. The milk always arrived at room temperature or slightly warm, as did the yogurt and this was consistent. I don’t know if warm milk and yogurt is a Holland America thing, but I sure did not like it. Continuing on with food safety, out of our 5 in-room meals, 3 of the days we had visibly dirty flatware - as in, still had food on it from the previous meal, dirty. This was disgusting. This also continued to be a problem across the whole ship, for the entire trip. We had to double check every single piece of flatware and glass we used. Here’s a “taste”.

Main Dining Room

Finally, the Main Dining Room (MDR). The food in the MDR seemed to be different (not better, unfortunately) from what was served in Lido, at least for the first 4 days. After the 4th day, the MDR simply mimicked what was being served in Lido, just plated differently. I can’t say I’ve been on a ton of cruises, but I’ve never seen this happen - usually the MDR is in place for food diversity. I suppose it is nice for someone who doesn’t want to spend the time in the MDR, but the illusion of food choice was completely gone.
I once asked for chicken to be added into my pasta dish, something that has never been an issue with any other…anything. When the dish came out, pasta, no chicken, but then I was offered the full chicken entree as a second plate, in addition to my pasta. I explained again I wanted to add chicken to my dish and he said they could not do that, but he would be happy to shred the BBQ grilled chicken dish into my pasta and mix it for me at the table. A nice gesture, but no thanks. I’m not sure if this is a limitation of the kitchen or understanding of our wait staff, or both. I watched him write “+chicken” next to the order, so I’m assuming the former.
The food listed on the menu also almost always was not what was brought to the table. Two distinct examples were a “Gourmet Greens Salad with Toasted Nuts, Cherry Tomatoes, and Orange Segments” that my wife ordered once. What arrived was an iceberg lettuce salad, walnuts, sliced tomato, and no oranges. The following night I ordered “Ricotta and Spinach Tortellini with Spicy Arrabbiata Sauce and Grilled Vegetables”, what arrived was the frozen cheese tortellini from Lido with the marinara sauce on the buffet that is offered every single night. I went to Lido after our dinner to confirm this with 100% accuracy. Don’t get me wrong, I am a man who loves his cheese tortellini, but that's just false advertising that I feel is purposefully used to make it “feel” more premium.
After our experience with dirty flatware in our room, we started checking ours extensively before each meal in the MDR and had 3 different additional occasions where there was still food or drink on the fork, spoon, or cup, from the previous user. We brought this up to the staff each time, got an apology, but never truly trusted the cleanliness of anything onwards.
From a time perspective, the MDR took forever. Our shortest trip to the MDR was a lunch which took just under an hour and a half. We often would sit with our finished appetizers plates for 10-15 minutes before someone would come take them from us, then wait another 10-15 for our entrees. Often our drinks were not filled, or just forgotten all together. It was very odd…the staff seemed extremely busy, but often felt like they weren’t getting much done. I saw many times that staff would be shuffling clean plates from table to table, just to move them back to a big stack at the end, then repeat the same process with the same plates.
Similar to our in-room experience, our food always arrived at questionable temperatures. I ordered a Caesar salad 3-4 times throughout the trip and it always arrived warm to the table - not room temperature, warm. Again, maybe a Holland America thing, but I did not like it. Our entrees were always room temperature or cold and the one time I sent it back, it took 20 minutes to get a replacement, just for the replacement to be cold. I’m really not expecting the world here, but at least some level of expediency. It never felt like the wait staff’s fault (perhaps minus the shuffling), but someone in the chain was seriously letting them down.

CONCLUSION

There’s more I could say about everything on the ship, but I will just leave it that it was not a pleasant or even decent Eurodam experience for either of us. Overall the sailing experience with Holland America felt extremely cheap, dated, and by the end, dirty. I cannot see us sailing with Holland America ever again, which is a shame since they do offer some interesting itineraries elsewhere in the world. We honestly went into the vacation really wanting to like Holland America as it seemed what was advertised aligned very well with our interests.
The issues come as a bit of a shock to both of us, as we felt that Holland presents itself as a “premium” cruise line with top-quality dining and entertainment and reviews seem to state the same. Based on our Eurodam experience, it couldn't be further from the truth. I really hope our experience was a one-off, but it was a really miserable one. We’ve had 3-night “booze cruises” out of Port Canaveral that have had considerably better dining and entertainment, at a significantly lower price point, extrapolated out.
Despite all the issues with the ship, Alaska exceeded everything I could have imagined. This was still one of the greatest vacations we’ve ever taken and I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend an Alaska itinerary to anyone, just avoid Holland America at all costs.

last two pickups have been absolute fire. First one, for the 4/20 sale I hit up DoomsDay. I won't review everything I go from him, but the Rainbow Truffles, White Nightmare, and Cookie Breath were all phenomenal smokes. If I have one complaint, i feel like I coughed more than normal smoking and vaping this bud - which i'm not a big fan of. Really enjoy a smooth hit where i'm not coughing so much. Outside of that, the buds were huge, stinky, terpy, white ash burn with the terps bleeding through the paper very nicely. Overall, 8/10 experience and would definitely go back. Really want to try the White Truffle. Everything I got seemed like it was well grown, trimmed, and cured. Minus an uptick in coughing , stellar pick up.
​
Once I cleared all those jars, I reached out to Clouded Valley and Fraktal. I've been scooping from CV for about a year now, and have never tried Fraktal. After hearing so many good things about Fraktal, I had to include them in my next pickup. First stop was Clouded, super convenient as usual. Always a pleasant experience picking up from Clouded Valley, and if you haven't yet, please check him out. Always has a fresh round of the fire in maine in rotation. Very rarely am I let down, and this time was no different. I grabbed 1 ounce, half being Mentations GMO and the other half being the Gorilla Glue #4 from Hashworks. Both were great but this batch of GMO was absolute fire. I've grabbed it before and it was super dry and wasn't as enjoyable as I thought it should be. Complete turnaround this time. First time I think I picked up a strain and am now motivated to just have this in stock at all times.; as in, always in rotation for me. It's great medicine. The Gorilla Glue was amazing. Not as smelly like some of the other GGs i've picked up in the past, but the bag appeal was 9/10. Nicely grown buds; super sticky and nice to break up and roll up into a joint. You could really feel the days anxiety leave your body after ripping this one through. Sad to see my last little bud of this today waking up.
​
Next up, Fraktal. Man was I impressed. They definitely seem to lean more on the Sativa side of things with lemon and citrusy strains and it was great to have that to balance out the heavy Indica's I got from Clouded. Ended up going with their Pheno Hunt and I really enjoyed everything. Most notably, the Laotion Kush was one of the creamiest citrussy terp's i've ever had. It brought me right back to my college days in Vermont that were flooded with great Sour Diesel and Chem strains. They really have this type of bud dialed in, and do a great job on it. The pheno hunt ounce was 8 jars and I was sad running out of each one. It was really nice to mix and match buds when rolling joints. The Sativa effects were great. After each inhale/exhale, my day got brighter and brighter and made staring off into my backyard quite nice and peaceful. Really balanced and brought no unwanted anxiety like some Sativa's do to me. All top notch.
Across all the stuff I got, here is my list from best to worst. Last 2 being the ones I really didn't care for. Everything else was quite enjoyable and tough to place on this list.
#1 - Laotian Kush (Fraktal)
#2 - GMO - Mentation (CV)
#3 - Triangle Kush x Lemon Thai (Fraktal)
#4 - Rainbow Truffle (DoomsDay)
#5 - Anaphylaxis (Fraktal)
#6 - White Nightmare (DoomsDay)
#7 - Gorilla Glue #4 (CV)
#8 - Cookie Breath (DoomsDay)
#9 - Lemon Thai (Fraktal)
#10 - Gary Larry (Fraktal)
#11 - Staten Island Diesel (Fraktal)
#12 - Ballerz (DoomsDay)
#13 - MeatNut (DoomsDay)
#14 - Broadkaster (Fraktal)
#15 - Strawberry Banana (DoomsDay)
​
There's one more from Fraktal i'm forgetting.
​
Now, any assistance with my next pickup would be greatly appreciated.

Hello everyone, I've been lurking around on the subreddit for a while, but I wanted to make a post because I have been wanting to give my opinions on the games as I have recently replayed every major title in the franchise (minus heroes and the story book games), and I wanted to start out with Sonic Colors, easily one of the most nostalgic sonic games from my childhood.
I will not spoil the story for those who haven't played the game, I will say that I still do not enjoy the story or comedy one bit and as the game gets older and I get older I find it even worse. I also feel like the modern voice cast really sounded rough here outside of tails. Tails and Eggman sounded great, but Sonic to me did not sound as good as he did in Unleashed or Adventure 2. Still love Roger Craig Smith since he voiced Ezio and Chris Redfield, and I feel like he has improved with the role ever since, especially in Frontiers.
I feel like Colors in regards to all of the Meta Era games has the most interesting, diverse, original, and fun level themes I've seen in a sonic game to this day. Tropical Resort is a solid first world, Sweet Mountain was such a cool and unique concept for a level theme with the food aesthetic, Starlight Canrival was just epic with the ships and rainbow roads, Planet Wisp is just a masterpiece. It illicit beauty, while showing you just how much damage Eggman was doing to it and it makes the level have a sort of depressing feel to it, and the music has this melancholic feel with a hint of industrial to it to really hit this feeling home. Aquarium Park is really cool too, definitely my second favorite as it I really enjoy the samurai themed robots, I love the Japanese aesthetic to it, and I love when sonic games make water levels fun. Asteroid Coaster was just fucking badass. Terminal Velocity was a bit boring for a final world admittedly, but oh well.
The soundtrack is goated, nuff said. Top 5 tracks from the game for me Are Planet Wisp Act 1, Aquarium Park Act 1, Sweet Mountain Act 3, Reach for the Stars Orchestral, and The world music for Aquarium Park.
The Level design in my opinion has not aged as well as I would have liked. I feel like the over reliance on 2D gameplay really did hurt this game quite a bit, and I find the 2D Level Design to be okay. I guess the best word to describe Colors would be kind... blocky? Sonic also feels very floaty. The Wisps were a cool mechanic that I think should have stayed in this game only (minus the spike and rocket wisps in generations). I also feel like the Boost Gameplay compared to Unleashed was just not as good. While in 3D, Sonic does not go nearly as fast as he did in Unleashed, he relies on wisps and destroying enemies to refill his boost gauge which makes the boost feel less powerful and rewarding, and the drift and quick step only being used in certain sections made sonic feel quite nerfed compared to Unleashed and Generations. I also think the game having 6 acts per world instead of 3 really hurt the level design, because Colors would reuse certain sections of levels or straight up reuse level design in order to pad out the game. I would have loved to have 9 zones instead 7, each with 3 unique levels.
I have no complaints with the graphics. For the Wii, it looks really good and I really like the color pallete this game uses.
All in all, Sonic Colors is a decent game that I enjoyed even with its flaws. I wish the Remaster was better, but it is what it is lol. I give it a 7/10.
If this post gets traction, I'll post a review of the most upvoted game in the comments in three days from this post, assuming I've played it of course. I would also love to see some discussion about the game below, assuming it's civil.

I got a letter today sending me to the insurance companies Dr. I'm from CT, this DR's office is in Long Island, a 2 hour drive from me, is it normal to send someone so far away? With my back issues a two hour drive there and back is a lot to ask, add to that the reviews for this place are terrible, Google reviews have 12 and ten are 1 star with two 5 star reviews which are from people working there. The complaints are wait times in the waiting area are 2-3 hours and the Dr doesn't do a full review, just does a min or so examine.
Sounds like it's basically like a pay for hire Doctor. Is there a way I can request a different one? That's just a long drive, with tolls, for someone who doesn't have any income, and my kids are both taken and picked up from school, so they'd have to miss a day, unless they provide transportation.
I have reached out to my attorney, but he's away for the day.

buried in this labor discrimination lawsuit is an allegation that at least one prominent reviewer at The Wine Spectator changes the scores to wines after they're revealed from blind tastings.
Putting aside the value of blind tasting and reviews, this is a massive allegation that undercuts all of what WS stands for re: their review process.
relevant para here:
During her tenure, Louis claims she lodged multiple complaints to Wine Spectator staff, including Worobiec, against senior editor James Molesworth, who reviews California Cabernet Sauvignon and Pinot Noir, for “changing wine scores after opening bags mid-flight” — meaning he would allegedly change a score after seeing the wine’s label.
"Wine Spectator prides itself on the fact that its critics taste wines blind, with bottles disguised in brown paper bags, in order to avoid bias. The magazine has long positioned its blind tasting philosophy as its core value. “The only way for a scrupulous critic to guarantee unbiased judgments is to review wines in blind tastings,” the magazine’s publisher and editor wrote in a 2012 letter, explaining that this commitment to “fairness” is “the very foundation of our approach to wine journalism.”
Linke to SF Chronicle article here (might be paywalled). https://www.sfchronicle.com/food/wine/article/wine-spectator-lawsuit-transgender-discrimmination-18120170.php

There’s states within our country that have minimum wages for industries such as the food industry, specifically written to have low wage because the position were commensurate by patrons tipping.
Reno/Sparks businesses are truly disgusting. It’s one thing to pay your employees a shitty wage, it’s another thing to make customers, who they themselves may be struggling, pick up the tab and work effort of a shitty ass business owner. If the dumbass business owner cannot do basic math and account for wages to their employees in the pricing of their products and services, then THEY SHOULD NOT BE A BUSINESS PROVIDING DUMBASSERY.
We got a lot of people in this subreddit, of all varieties. This shit is out of control, go leave google reviews, Yelp reviews, file complaints with the FCC, file complaints with Consumer Affairs, file complaints on businesses that are clearly the disease within our society and fucking everyone over.
Stop tipping the Cannabis stores also especially, such a disgrace on weed culture and the fact they walk 2-3ft, grab something, walk 2-5 steps back, and that is justification for a tip?
Insulting as fuck to the people who have laws specifically holding them down.

Obviously, spoilers on the entire game here. For context, I have been playing Zelda since 2014 with Twilight Princess as my first game. Since then I have played Skyward Sword, Breath of the Wild, Link's Awakening, and I am about halfway through Ocarina of Time. Because of my obvious bias towards more traditional 3D Zelda games (I enjoyed Skyward Sword and Twilight Princess the most) I will try to be as impartial as possible.
I tried so hard to like this game. I had my doubts at the beginning, but after watching the new trailer it sold me on the game. I didn't like some aspects of Breath of the Wild, but after seeing the new enemies and hopefully a return to a more traditional zelda game that people missed while keeping the awesome open world of Breath of the Wild I really thought it was going to be great. And some parts of it were, but some parts of it I did not like.
Firstly, I would like to congratulate Nintendo because the physics relating to the Ultrahand mechanic blew everyone away, including me, and it is clear that Tears of the Kingdom has some of the best physics and building of any video game out there. The amount of creativity that has sprung from this game is mindblowing, and I don't think any of us expected for there to be simply so much to do. Not only are there almost 30 devices you can obtain each with their own unique purpose, you can also combine them with almost anything you can find in the game. Want to make a stupidly long bridge that can get you around the temple of time at the start of the game? Why not? Want to skip the main puzzle in the shrine by haphazardly building a flying machine that just barely makes it to the end? Go right ahead. Ultrahand allows for so much creativity and makes the new shrines ten times more enjoyable than the ones in Breath of the Wild. Because of this, there is an infinite amount of replayability in this game and the community will always be finding new things to do with this. Judging from how you all pushed Breath of the Wild to its limits, I can't wait to see what will be done in this game. Ultrahand gets a 20/10.
Additionally, Fuse and Recall are also insanely fun and useful abilities that add so much to the game. While I miss the Stasis rune in particular, Recall and Ultrahand can be used in a similar way if done correctly, and it's so much more satisfying when you do it correctly. While Recall doesn't have as many uses as Fuse and Ultrahand, the game still finds great ways to use it, such as sending a Stone Talus' boulders back at it, or knocking those horrible Horriblins down from the cave ceiling. Additionally, I am extremely happy with how Nintendo fixed Durability with the Fuse mechanic. While the durability annoyed me less than some of the others who played Breath of the Wild, my main complaint was wasting several of my good weapons on an enemy like a Silver Bokoblin or Lynel that had a huge healthbar, and only getting one (or sometimes none) good weapons in return. However, with the guarantee that you will usually be able to get an equally powerful or sometimes even better weapon after killing an enemy by fusing their horns to any random "sturdy stick", I don't hesitate to fight Silver enemies or Lynels anymore and I feel much more free to do so. Both of these abilites get a 10/10.
My third compliment goes to the game's shrines. I disliked Breath of the Wild's shrines. I found them tedious and annoying to do, and often skipped them or looked up the answers online. Especially when your only reward was a piece of heart or tiny fraction of a stamina wheel, I just clicked on them to save them as a travel checkpoint and moved on. Even their design was ugly to me. However, the new shrines are much better. While they are easier than Breath of the Wild's shrines, the rewards are a little less lucrative to balance it out and they are so much more fun to do because of how they creatively use the new abilites and allow for a multitude of different ways to solve problems. Many people do not like the "Proving Grounds" shrines, but I absolutely love them because they are a real challenge and I don't have to worry about losing 50 bomb arrows or several good weapons for a "Guardian Sword ++" and some ancient screws. Even if I die five times trying to complete them, I still have fun. And aesthetically they are so much better, the look of the temple, the texture of the lights of blessing, even the music feels a lot less claustrophobic and drab like the ones in Breath of the Wild did. 9/10.
Fourthly, the Great Sky Island was absolutely amazing and I loved every second of it. It felt just like it did when I played Breath of the Wild for the first time, being plunged into an unknown and untouched environment and having to learn the mechanics of this new game. The Zonai Constructs don't carry the same fear level as Guardians did, but they were still cool enemies to fight with drops that were actually helpful unlike the Ancient Screws and Springs which only became helpful late-game. I obviously can't go through every part of the island, but the parts I enjoyed the best were crossing the huge lake to the west, climbing the snowy mountain to get to a shrine where I unsuccessfully attempted to craft a hovercraft out of logs, going on Minecarts around the island, and fusing random crap to sticks to make the most ridiculous weapons possible. 9/10.
My last compliment goes to the introduction of Gloom into the game. When it is first introduced, the Gloom is absolutely frightening, and plunging into the depths for the first time was beyond scary. Malice was an annoying obstacle that you just jumped across until you got to where you needed to be and ate a few foods, but you are forced to avoid the Gloom in this game because you know that it will be catastrophic if you walk in it for too long because the only cure is an extremely rare flower that can only be found in the sky. I just wish that the lightroots either weren't so common, or didn't heal your healthbar, because it kind of subtracted the fear aspect a little bit. The way it actually destroyed your heart containers in the final battle against Ganondorf instead of rendering them unusable for a little while was another surprise I did not expect, and killing the Demon Dragon with a single heart was the best moment of the game for me. 8/10.
Some other minor things I liked:
• Gleeoks are amazing bosses, better than any of the bosses in Breath of the Wild OR Tears of the Kingdom apart from the Ganondorf fight, easy 10/10
• While the Wind Temple wasn't my favorite, I did enjoy the Rito Village quest in the beginning and the leadup to the Wind Temple where you flew with Tulin to the very top. 9/10.
• Pizza?! I loved the introduction of Tomatoes and Cheese into the game! Shame you couldn't do more with them. 7/10.
• The Master Kohga battles were very good. While he was still easy to kill once he was stunned, it is another instance of Ultrahand and Link's other new abilities putting a creative and spicy twist on an old fight. Autobuild was also a lifesaver. 9/10.
• The second stage of the Ganondorf bossfight was probably the most fun I've had with a boss since Twilight Princess. It felt actually challenging in a way that could only be compared to the Gleeok Battles. It was so hard to even get a single hit into his massive healthbar when he could dodge more than 90% of your shots and destroy your health bar. Probably shouldn't have gone in without upgrading any of my armor but doing that was so tedious :p 20/10.
Now that I've talked about what was great about Tears of the Kingdom, here is the stuff I disliked about the game. While I think that the people who call this game an "overpriced DLC" are not arguing in good faith, I can see their point. Much of Breath of the Wild's structure was carried over into Tears of the Kingdom and it felt like I was redoing the same things I did in the old game, just with a new texture and a slightly different story.
Because of how insanely complicated it must have been to put Ultrahand in the game, it was clear that that was what Nintendo spent most of their time on when making Tears of the Kingdom, going for a more creative approach rather than a return to the traditional like I had hoped. And while this was a perfectly valid thing to do that clearly made a lot of people happy, it just wasn't what I wanted, and the final trailers for the game feel like they were marketing a different game than they were actually selling. When they went above and beyond with Link's new abilities, it left other aspects of the game such as combat, story, gameplay, and the structure of the game itself lacking and awfully familiar, if not the same, as Breath of the Wild.
Now that I've talked about what was great about Tears of the Kingdom, here is the stuff I disliked about the game. While I think that the people who call this game an "overpriced DLC" are not arguing in good faith, I can see their point. Much of Breath of the Wild's structure was carried over into Tears of the Kingdom and it felt like I was redoing the same things I did in the old game, just with a new texture and a slightly different story.
Because of how insanely complicated it must have been to put Ultrahand in the game, it was clear that that was what Nintendo spent most of their time on when making Tears of the Kingdom, going for a more creative approach rather than a return to the traditional like I had hoped. And while this was a perfectly valid thing to do that clearly made a lot of people happy, it just wasn't what I wanted, and the final trailers for the game feel like they were marketing a different game than they were actually selling. When they went above and beyond with Link's new abilities, it left other aspects of the game such as combat, story, gameplay, and the structure of the game itself lacking and awfully familiar, if not the same, as Breath of the Wild.
My biggest issue with this game is the story. I disliked almost every part of it. We start out with a very solid intro scene where we meet shriveled Ganondorf and Zelda disappears. Then we see her disappear as she steals our half of a master sword at the end of the Great Sky Island. However, the game then leads us into a wild goose chase to find Zelda for almost the entire game until near the end when we go inside Hyrule Castle. This was fine in Skyward Sword because Zelda was much more likable and it only took up half of the game. I felt like "I have to save Zelda. I have to." in SS and in Tears of the Kingdom I was like "Let's just get this over already." Additionally, the Upheaval which is apparently the placeholder of the Calamity in BOTW just feels like not a threat at all. The castle rose into the air and a few meteors came down and crashed into Kakariko village. The mud in the water doesn't seem to be affecting the Zora much at all, the Gerudo seem relatively unharmed by the Gibdos, only retreating into an underground bunker, and we have almost no time to see how the rock roast affects the Gorons before Yunobo is saved. The only place where I felt any sense of urgency was in Rito Village where the town was starving and abandoned the children to their fate because they're the worst parents ever or something. I enjoyed saving Rito village. The others not so much. And let's not even talk about the Sages. 3/4 of them we had already interacted with heavily in the previous games, which was another reason I liked the Rito quest so much. Yunobo is still as weak and annoying as ever, nothing has changed with Riju, and Sidon is so boring and lifeless comparing to the other game. As we go into the dungeons we have four conversations that are, quite literally, copy and pasted into each one voiced by the blandest sages ever.
"Come, Come" (Random Sage)
"Did you hear that voice?" (Yunobo, Sidon, Riju, Tulin)
and when we get to the end of the dungeon
"X, I am your ancestor from a long time ago. I was the sage of x. Descendant you make me proud. The monster you killed tried to stop you from obtaining my secret stone. Once upon a time there was a great war where the Demon King tried to kill us and Rauru gave us all secret stones but he was too strong so Rauru sacrificed himself to seal him away. And then Zelda appeared to me and told me that it was the duty of the x to aid you Link."
"So it's my duty to... help you? Now take my scary ghost form with a useless ability (besides tulin) to follow you around the rest of your journey!"
These cutscenes weren't disappointing. I hated them. As a person who loves the story so much they never skip a single cutscene these I physically couldn't watch. Everything about them was awful. The completely dry, lifeless, unneccesary sages which don't even have a name or a face and talk like NPCs or someone from an awful anime episode and say the exact same thing four times over, the empty void we are surrounded in, the cutscene we have to watch four times over, the robotic responses that come from the sages, everything about it was horrible and it feels like Nintendo was trying to reinsert the champions in the game but these are such a worse downgrade from them. At the end of the game I was like "ok... I give this a 7/10" and then the horrible after-credits scene with the four sages came in where they repeated the robotic speech from one of the memories and if that was supposed to be a meaningful scene it certainly was not.
Zelda's sacrifice probably would have meant so much more to me if the rest of the story hadn't frustrated me so much. But it feels like it meant nothing since the Demon King is such a non-threat compared to Calamity Ganon. Calamity Ganon devastated Hyrule, destroying most of the villages and probably killing half of the people there, and murdering 4 of the best characters in Zelda history who meant so much to their people that statues were built for them. In comparison, Ganondorf levitated a castle in the air and added some poo to Zora's domain. It ruins Zelda's moment so much because it would have been so beautiful if it felt like she was sacrificing herself for something meaningful. It frustrates me to no end because Ganondorf was a villain I was so hyped about and he's shriveled about 90% of the game and only appears three times, once in the beginning, once as a vision in Hyrule Castle, and once at the end, and only one of them is fully revived Ganondorf. In fact, we only see this version of Ganondorf for a third of the final bossfight. We need more Ganondorf! At least add a sixth dungeon to the game below Hyrule Castle where Ganondorf appears after, or maybe he appears before we get the Master Sword. We just needed more of Ganondorf and more of him being a threat to Hyrule.
Another complaint are the sages. I already stated that three out of the four sages had already been fleshed out in a previous game and not much was added to their personalities this time around. Why couldn't we have gotten new people? Maybe make Muzu a sage, we always like having an old man around, or give Barta/Bullaria some importance for the Gerudo and hand over the torch to one of those young Gorons that always follow Yunobo around. It would have been so much fun to have new characters. The sages add absolutely nothing to the experience of this game besides showing up in the awful cutscenes and it just feels like they're trying to repeat what they had in the last game. If they're going to do that, at least do it with someone new so it doesn't feel like I have to replay the game again. We already helped these people with their character growth in the last game. We know that Riju is insecure about her place as the Gerudo chief, and we helped her be more respected after retriveing the Thunder Helm and calming Naboris. We know that Sidon feels a sense of duty to his domain after what happened to his sister, and we spend time with him getting shock arrows, obtaining the Zora armor, and travelling around Lanayru with him until we got to Zora's domain. We helped Yunobo gain his confidence after he accompained us by firing himself at Rudania. These characters went through almost no development except for Tulin (again showing what Nintendo did right with Rito Village) because he's a new character.
Finally, the memories. Why did there have to be memories again. It would have been such an easy shift from Breath of the Wild, to give us a new main quest. While I was not a big fan of the time travel arc that Zelda went through, it was still workable, but there was no reason to have these stupid memories again. We saw so much of past Ganon and so little of present Ganon. I don't care what happened to the Goat Man and how the Kingdom of Hyrule was formed. Half of those memories were not essential to the plot and were just filler content. In particular, the one with Mineru just spoils Zelda's sacrifice altogether. Mineru as a whole just feels like such an annoying character and I would have much rathered a sheikah sage or even a korok.
While I criticize much of this game for remaining the same as BOTW, the story was one of the only aspects where it was a clear downgrade. So much of what was shown in the trailers hyped this game to be an impactful, story-filled game and many of these scenes are from memories, which I absolutely hate, and one of the scenes with Ganondorf wasn't even in the actual game, just a scene melded together from a memory and the speech at the end!
And why on earth did they call them secret stones. It was so cringe. It felt like something I would hear from a ten year old's cartoon show and I don't know why they insisted calling them that when we have a much better name for them that is in the TITLE OF THE GAME.
All in all, the story gets a 2/10.
Another issue I have with this game is Ascend and how it affects our experience in the dungeons. I liked the Lightning Temple, the Fire Temple and Wind Temple were okay, and the Water Temple was just plain awful. I saw a post about someone complaining about the puzzles in TOTK being too hard and I saw someone respond "If they think these puzzles are hard, I can't imagine them playing Twilight Princess." And I wholeheartedly believe that. While I'm not trying to make this review a comparison to Twilight Princess and Skyward Sword, games which are completely different from this one, the puzzles in this game were either super easy or required us to do something that no one would have thought of. I was stuck in the Lightning Temple on two different points, one where the mirrors seemed to reflect to nothing in particular (what you had to do was grab a spare mirror from another room and fuse it to the statue so that it would face the right way which was a random solution that I didn't expect but I actually enjoyed) and another where I had no idea how to get to the last terminal and I looked around for 20 minutes until I looked it up online and found that I ascended into a place I wasn't supposed to and I actually had to teleport out of the temple to a nearby shrine, travel back to the temple on foot, go through another entrance I hadn't gone through, go through a really long tunnel to get to the terminal I should have gone to first. In a game which prioritizes open world exploration and being able to do anything you wanted, this haphazard "linearity" inside the lightning temple really ruined the experience of a dungeon I otherwise enjoyed. Which leads me to my point on Ascend. While Recall, Fuse, and Ultrahand add to this game in so many amazing and dynamic ways, Ascend just feels like something they added because they needed a fourth ability and a way to get out of caves. It allows so many dungeons to be cheesed and using it in the Lightning Temple made the experience so much more complicated than it needed to be. Apart from caves, every other place where you needed to use ascend could have been done with Revali's gale (rest in peace) or a bonfire + hylian pine cone, or any of the other devices that came with ultrahand.
The uses made for it in the Great Sky Island and in other places felt forced and the developers could have easily come up with another creative way to do this without ascend. I just wish that Ascend and Autobuild were disabled inside temples because it would have made things so much better. The companions also make the temples much more annoying because half the time all you're doing is waiting for Riju or Sidon to stop standing in a random corner and walk up to you. Especially in the Water Temple where your ability was on a time limit, this was especially annoying. The Water and Wind Temples felt like big sky islands and not dungeons. The Snowpeak Ruins in Twilight Princess and the Sandship in Skyward Sword are both excellent examples about how to turn something unconventional into an excellent dungeon, but these temples fail in so many ways. Not only is it so easy to get around the entire dungeon with a paraglider and Tulin that makes it possible to complete the dungeon in under 30 minutes on your first playthrough, the puzzles were so easy and the Wind Temple's boss in particular was so easy to kill despite it looking so fearsome. The Mud Octorok was actually a great boss that I have no complaints about, but the rest of the temple was really awful, with most of the puzzles simply being chalked up to "redirect this floating water bubble somewhere else so you can get to a terminal." The terminal thing returning was also something that was a huge letdown. There was no reason to continue it from Breath of the Wild, especially when the Divine Beast dungeons were such a huge complaint, when they could have added a system of small keys, miniboss, maybe even a new ultrahand ability similar to the ones we got from the sages to replace having a companion with you that you would be able to use across the dungeon. This would have turned the Lightning Temple from a 7/10 dungeon to an easy 9/10 or even 10/10 and would have improved my outlook on the other dungeons a lot more, particularly the fire temple, which was so great aesthetically but the gameplay and puzzles simply were not. While I liked the Lightning Temple and to a lesser extent the Fire Temple and the bossfights were much better, I found myself enjoying the Divine Beasts more than the Wind and Water Temples, and many of the bosses were such pushovers. The dungeons in this game get a 4/10.
I have a number of other smaller complaints. First is that I really wished there were more food and armor options. A return to the "meat skewers" and "fried wild greens" let me down a bit as I was hoping for more variance on food, especially after they added new items like stambulbs and tomatoes that I thought would replace the existing items. I mean, we had a whole sidequest dedicated to discovering Cheese and there's only three recipes for it! (as far as I know) Additionally, I wouldn't have been upset if they gave us the same effects for armor as before, just with a new name and texture. Like maybe they could have slightly updated the look of the Hylian set like they did with the Champion's tunic, or we could have the full Sheikah uniform instead of the Stealth armor, or a Lightning Helmet that actually looked different instead of one that reused the exact same texture as the thunder helm. New monsters such as Horriblins, Aerocudas, and Boss Bokoblins added some great new fights to the game, and I wouldn't have even cared if they reused the same enemies, but the way they attack is the exact same as in Breath of the Wild, which left the combat a little predictable and I was able to kill a Gloom Lynel first try. The only battles that really challenged me were against the Gleeoks, one of the best bosses in all of Zelda history.
My last issue with this game is that I really don't understand what vibe they were going for. Majora's Mask was twisted and disturbing. Twilight Princess was dark and gloomy. Skyward Sword was bright and hopeful. Breath of the Wild was free and really emphasized nature. But with Tears of the Kingdom, they really seem to be doing five things at once and accomplishing none of them. They try to put an emphasis on the creative aspect by adding things like Zonai Tech to the beginning and adding new technologies like the batteries, factories, skyview towers, and other. Then they also try to make this game dark and scary by introducing some horrifying things like chasms, gloom hands, and underground areas. They made the game seem bright and sunny like Skyward Sword in the beginning with the Great Sky Island and the bright yellow color palette. Then they also try to keep the open-world aspect of Breath of the Wild by keeping this massive open world, but with nothing to do inside it since we've already seen most of the stuff in this game's nature areas apart from the new caves. I don't understand what the developers were trying to make this game feel like, and it feels like they tried to do too many things at once and failed to flesh out all of them. I would have loved to see a restored Hyrule that we could explore and I would have also loved to have a nature-filled world like in BOTW with new plants, foods, caves, animals, and areas to explore, but the Hyrule in TOTK seems like a haphazard mixture of both.
There's no incentive to explore this time around with only 3-4 new plants and animals in the overworld and only a few caves that only have Brightbloom seeds, bomb flowers, and bubblefrogs. I love the caves, but they seem a bit same-y over time and I have no intention to find them all. I can't even ride around Hyrule on a horse like in BOTW or in a car like the developers seem to want us to do because I run into those stupid Zonai rocks that are littered around every 5 seconds for no particular reason. All they do is make transportation annoying and I wonder why they went through the effort to put all of the sky island materials on the overworld by these ugly rocks instead of actually having more sky islands like we wanted. The Great Sky Island was undoubtedly the most solid part of Tears of the Kingdom's Hyrule, so why did they deincentivise sky exploration by having most of the sky materials on these fallen rocks?
All in all, Nintendo outdid themselves with the coding in this game, especially putting a massive title like this on the six-year-old Nintendo Switch. However, it was clear that they spent most of their time coding in these new mechanics and the writers clearly phoned in this time around with the worst story and dialogue I have seen in any Zelda game so far. Maybe putting in a completely new game on Breath of the Wild's massive world was too much to ask, but so much of Tears of the Kingdom either directly copies Breath of the Wild (four dungeons in the exact same lands, the exact same food, combat, armor, and people) or takes the same structure and retextures it (four terminals in a dungeon, memories, shrines, a quest to rebuild a village from scratch, "champions" that pass on their abilities to their successors, and those cursed Korok seeds) that I really found no reason to play this game after 100 hours because there was nothing new left to do besides a multitude of side quests that I didn't feel like doing because I had no attachment to this Hyrule like I did in Twilight Princess, Skyward Sword, Link's Awakening, and Breath of the Wild. Maybe I would have liked it more if I was a new player and hadn't played BOTW before, but the amount of content that was unnecessarily copied from the last game into this one really ruined the experience for me. All in all, this Zelda is a C+ for me, a 6.5/10. While it was more fun than the linear and small world of Link's Awakening, it couldn't compare with the story aspect of Twilight Princess and Skyward Sword or the feel of Breath of the Wild.
TLDR: While Nintendo went above and beyond with the new Ultrahand, Fuse, and Recall mechanics, it ultimately wasn't enough for me to save a game that had an extremely lacking story, underwhelming content and dungeons, and a multitude of side quests that was basically repeating everything you had done in 2017. If you're going to argue with me in the comments, please actually read the whole thing first.

Obviously, spoilers on the entire game here. For context, I have been playing Zelda since 2014 with Twilight Princess as my first game. Since then I have played Skyward Sword, Breath of the Wild, Link's Awakening, and I am about halfway through Ocarina of Time. Because of my obvious bias towards more traditional 3D Zelda games (I enjoyed Skyward Sword and Twilight Princess the most) I will try to be as impartial as possible.
I tried so hard to like this game. I had my doubts at the beginning, but after watching the new trailer it sold me on the game. I didn't like some aspects of Breath of the Wild, but after seeing the new enemies and hopefully a return to a more traditional zelda game that people missed while keeping the awesome open world of Breath of the Wild I really thought it was going to be great. And some parts of it were, but some parts of it I did not like.
Firstly, I would like to congratulate Nintendo because the physics relating to the Ultrahand mechanic blew everyone away, including me, and it is clear that Tears of the Kingdom has some of the best physics and building of any video game out there. The amount of creativity that has sprung from this game is mindblowing, and I don't think any of us expected for there to be simply so much to do. Not only are there almost 30 devices you can obtain each with their own unique purpose, you can also combine them with almost anything you can find in the game. Want to make a stupidly long bridge that can get you around the temple of time at the start of the game? Why not? Want to skip the main puzzle in the shrine by haphazardly building a flying machine that just barely makes it to the end? Go right ahead. Ultrahand allows for so much creativity and makes the new shrines ten times more enjoyable than the ones in Breath of the Wild. Because of this, there is an infinite amount of replayability in this game and the community will always be finding new things to do with this. Judging from how you all pushed Breath of the Wild to its limits, I can't wait to see what will be done in this game. Ultrahand gets a 20/10.
Additionally, Fuse and Recall are also insanely fun and useful abilities that add so much to the game. While I miss the Stasis rune in particular, Recall and Ultrahand can be used in a similar way if done correctly, and it's so much more satisfying when you do it correctly. While Recall doesn't have as many uses as Fuse and Ultrahand, the game still finds great ways to use it, such as sending a Stone Talus' boulders back at it, or knocking those horrible Horriblins down from the cave ceiling. Additionally, I am extremely happy with how Nintendo fixed Durability with the Fuse mechanic. While the durability annoyed me less than some of the others who played Breath of the Wild, my main complaint was wasting several of my good weapons on an enemy like a Silver Bokoblin or Lynel that had a huge healthbar, and only getting one (or sometimes none) good weapons in return. However, with the guarantee that you will usually be able to get an equally powerful or sometimes even better weapon after killing an enemy by fusing their horns to any random "sturdy stick", I don't hesitate to fight Silver enemies or Lynels anymore and I feel much more free to do so. Both of these abilites get a 10/10.
My third compliment goes to the game's shrines. I disliked Breath of the Wild's shrines. I found them tedious and annoying to do, and often skipped them or looked up the answers online. Especially when your only reward was a piece of heart or tiny fraction of a stamina wheel, I just clicked on them to save them as a travel checkpoint and moved on. Even their design was ugly to me. However, the new shrines are much better. While they are easier than Breath of the Wild's shrines, the rewards are a little less lucrative to balance it out and they are so much more fun to do because of how they creatively use the new abilites and allow for a multitude of different ways to solve problems. Many people do not like the "Proving Grounds" shrines, but I absolutely love them because they are a real challenge and I don't have to worry about losing 50 bomb arrows or several good weapons for a "Guardian Sword ++" and some ancient screws. Even if I die five times trying to complete them, I still have fun. And aesthetically they are so much better, the look of the temple, the texture of the lights of blessing, even the music feels a lot less claustrophobic and drab like the ones in Breath of the Wild did.
Fourthly, the Great Sky Island was absolutely amazing and I loved every second of it. It felt just like it did when I played Breath of the Wild for the first time, being plunged into an unknown and untouched environment and having to learn the mechanics of this new game. The Zonai Constructs don't carry the same fear level as Guardians did, but they were still cool enemies to fight with drops that were actually helpful unlike the Ancient Screws and Springs which only became helpful late-game. I obviously can't go through every part of the island, but the parts I enjoyed the best were crossing the huge lake to the west, climbing the snowy mountain to get to a shrine where I unsuccessfully attempted to craft a hovercraft out of logs, going on Minecarts around the island, and fusing random crap to sticks to make the most ridiculous weapons possible.
My last compliment goes to the introduction of Gloom into the game. When it is first introduced, the Gloom is absolutely frightening, and plunging into the depths for the first time was beyond scary. Malice was an annoying obstacle that you just jumped across until you got to where you needed to be and ate a few foods, but you are forced to avoid the Gloom in this game because you know that it will be catastrophic if you walk in it for too long because the only cure is an extremely rare flower that can only be found in the sky. I just wish that the lightroots either weren't so common, or didn't heal your healthbar, because it kind of subtracted the fear aspect a little bit. The way it actually destroyed your heart containers in the final battle against Ganondorf instead of rendering them unusable for a little while was another surprise I did not expect, and killing the Demon Dragon with a single heart was the best moment of the game for me.
Some other minor things I liked:

• Gleeoks are amazing bosses, better than any of the bosses in Breath of the Wild OR Tears of the Kingdom apart from the Ganondorf fight, easy 10/10
• While the Wind Temple wasn't my favorite, I did enjoy the Rito Village quest in the beginning and the leadup to the Wind Temple where you flew with Tulin to the very top. 9/10.
• Pizza?! I loved the introduction of Tomatoes and Cheese into the game! Shame you couldn't do more with them. 7/10.
• The Master Kohga battles were very good. While he was still easy to kill once he was stunned, it is another instance of Ultrahand and Link's other new abilities putting a creative and spicy twist on an old fight. Autobuild was also a lifesaver. 9/10.
• The second stage of the Ganondorf bossfight was probably the most fun I've had with a boss since Twilight Princess. It felt actually challenging in a way that could only be compared to the Gleeok Battles. It was so hard to even get a single hit into his massive healthbar when he could dodge more than 90% of your shots and destroy your health bar. Probably shouldn't have gone in without upgrading any of my armor but doing that was so tedious :p 20/10.

Now that I've talked about what was great about Tears of the Kingdom, here is the stuff I disliked about the game. While I think that the people who call this game an "overpriced DLC" are not arguing in good faith, I can see their point. Much of Breath of the Wild's structure was carried over into Tears of the Kingdom and it felt like I was redoing the same things I did in the old game, just with a new texture and a slightly different story.
Because of how insanely complicated it must have been to put Ultrahand in the game, it was clear that that was what Nintendo spent most of their time on when making Tears of the Kingdom, going for a more creative approach rather than a return to the traditional like I had hoped. And while this was a perfectly valid thing to do that clearly made a lot of people happy, it just wasn't what I wanted, and the final trailers for the game feel like they were marketing a different game than they were actually selling. When they went above and beyond with Link's new abilities, it left other aspects of the game such as combat, story, gameplay, and the structure of the game itself lacking and awfully familiar, if not the same, as Breath of the Wild.
My biggest issue with this game is the story. I disliked almost every part of it. We start out with a very solid intro scene where we meet shriveled Ganondorf and Zelda disappears. Then we see her disappear as she steals our half of a master sword at the end of the Great Sky Island. However, the game then leads us into a wild goose chase to find Zelda for almost the entire game until near the end when we go inside Hyrule Castle. This was fine in Skyward Sword because Zelda was much more likable and it only took up half of the game. I felt like "I have to save Zelda. I have to." in SS and in Tears of the Kingdom I was like "Let's just get this over already." Additionally, the Upheaval which is apparently the placeholder of the Calamity in BOTW just feels like not a threat at all. The castle rose into the air and a few meteors came down and crashed into Kakariko village. The mud in the water doesn't seem to be affecting the Zora much at all, the Gerudo seem relatively unharmed by the Gibdos, only retreating into an underground bunker, and we have almost no time to see how the rock roast affects the Gorons before Yunobo is saved. The only place where I felt any sense of urgency was in Rito Village where the town was starving and abandoned the children to their fate because they're the worst parents ever or something. I enjoyed saving Rito village. The others not so much. And let's not even talk about the Sages. 3/4 of them we had already interacted with heavily in the previous games, which was another reason I liked the Rito quest so much. Yunobo is still as weak and annoying as ever, nothing has changed with Riju, and Sidon is so boring and lifeless comparing to the other game. As we go into the dungeons we have four conversations that are, quite literally, copy and pasted into each one voiced by the blandest sages ever.
"Come, Come" (Random Sage)
"Did you hear that voice?" (Yunobo, Sidon, Riju, Tulin)
and when we get to the end of the dungeon
"X, I am your ancestor from a long time ago. I was the sage of x. Descendant you make me proud. The monster you killed tried to stop you from obtaining my secret stone. Once upon a time there was a great war where the Demon King tried to kill us and Rauru gave us all secret stones but he was too strong so Rauru sacrificed himself to seal him away. And then Zelda appeared to me and told me that it was the duty of the x to aid you Link."
"So it's my duty to... help you? Now take my scary ghost form with a useless ability (besides tulin) to follow you around the rest of your journey!"
These cutscenes weren't disappointing. I hated them. As a person who loves the story so much they never skip a single cutscene these I physically couldn't watch. Everything about them was awful. The completely dry, lifeless, unneccesary sages which don't even have a name or a face and talk like NPCs or someone from an awful anime episode and say the exact same thing four times over, the empty void we are surrounded in, the cutscene we have to watch four times over, the robotic responses that come from the sages, everything about it was horrible and it feels like Nintendo was trying to reinsert the champions in the game but these are such a worse downgrade from them. At the end of the game I was like "ok... I give this a 7/10" and then the horrible after-credits scene with the four sages came in where they repeated the robotic speech from one of the memories and if that was supposed to be a meaningful scene it certainly was not.
Zelda's sacrifice probably would have meant so much more to me if the rest of the story hadn't frustrated me so much. But it feels like it meant nothing since the Demon King is such a non-threat compared to Calamity Ganon. Calamity Ganon devastated Hyrule, destroying most of the villages and probably killing half of the people there, and murdering 4 of the best characters in Zelda history who meant so much to their people that statues were built for them. In comparison, Ganondorf levitated a castle in the air and added some poo to Zora's domain. It ruins Zelda's moment so much because it would have been so beautiful if it felt like she was sacrificing herself for something meaningful. It frustrates me to no end because Ganondorf was a villain I was so hyped about and he's shriveled about 90% of the game and only appears three times, once in the beginning, once as a vision in Hyrule Castle, and once at the end, and only one of them is fully revived Ganondorf. In fact, we only see this version of Ganondorf for a third of the final bossfight. We need more Ganondorf! At least add a sixth dungeon to the game below Hyrule Castle where Ganondorf appears after, or maybe he appears before we get the Master Sword. We just needed more of Ganondorf and more of him being a threat to Hyrule.
Another complaint are the sages. I already stated that three out of the four sages had already been fleshed out in a previous game and not much was added to their personalities this time around. Why couldn't we have gotten new people? Maybe make Muzu a sage, we always like having an old man around, or give Barta/Bullaria some importance for the Gerudo and hand over the torch to one of those young Gorons that always follow Yunobo around. It would have been so much fun to have new characters. The sages add absolutely nothing to the experience of this game besides showing up in the awful cutscenes and it just feels like they're trying to repeat what they had in the last game. If they're going to do that, at least do it with someone new so it doesn't feel like I have to replay the game again. We already helped these people with their character growth in the last game. We know that Riju is insecure about her place as the Gerudo chief, and we helped her be more respected after retriveing the Thunder Helm and calming Naboris. We know that Sidon feels a sense of duty to his domain after what happened to his sister, and we spend time with him getting shock arrows, obtaining the Zora armor, and travelling around Lanayru with him until we got to Zora's domain. We helped Yunobo gain his confidence after he accompained us by firing himself at Rudania. These characters went through almost no development except for Tulin (again showing what Nintendo did right with Rito Village) because he's a new character.
Finally, the memories. Why did there have to be memories again. It would have been such an easy shift from Breath of the Wild, to give us a new main quest. While I was not a big fan of the time travel arc that Zelda went through, it was still workable, but there was no reason to have these stupid memories again. We saw so much of past Ganon and so little of present Ganon. I don't care what happened to the Goat Man and how the Kingdom of Hyrule was formed. Half of those memories were not essential to the plot and were just filler content. In particular, the one with Mineru just spoils Zelda's sacrifice altogether. Mineru as a whole just feels like such an annoying character and I would have much rathered a sheikah sage or even a korok.
While I criticize much of this game for remaining the same as BOTW, the story was one of the only aspects where it was a clear downgrade. So much of what was shown in the trailers hyped this game to be an impactful, story-filled game and many of these scenes are from memories, which I absolutely hate, and one of the scenes with Ganondorf wasn't even in the actual game, just a scene melded together from a memory and the speech at the end!
Another issue I have with this game is Ascend and how it affects our experience in the dungeons. I liked the Lightning Temple, the Fire Temple and Wind Temple were okay, and the Water Temple was just plain awful. I saw a post about someone complaining about the puzzles in TOTK being too hard and I saw someone respond "If they think these puzzles are hard, I can't imagine them playing Twilight Princess." And I wholeheartedly believe that. While I'm not trying to make this review a comparison to Twilight Princess and Skyward Sword, games which are completely different from this one, the puzzles in this game were either super easy or required us to do something that no one would have thought of. I was stuck in the Lightning Temple on two different points, one where the mirrors seemed to reflect to nothing in particular (what you had to do was grab a spare mirror from another room and fuse it to the statue so that it would face the right way which was a random solution that I didn't expect but I actually enjoyed) and another where I had no idea how to get to the last terminal and I looked around for 20 minutes until I looked it up online and found that I ascended into a place I wasn't supposed to and I actually had to teleport out of the temple to a nearby shrine, travel back to the temple on foot, go through another entrance I hadn't gone through, go through a really long tunnel to get to the terminal I should have gone to first. In a game which prioritizes open world exploration and being able to do anything you wanted, this haphazard "linearity" inside the lightning temple really ruined the experience of a dungeon I otherwise enjoyed. Which leads me to my point on Ascend. While Recall, Fuse, and Ultrahand add to this game in so many amazing and dynamic ways, Ascend just feels like something they added because they needed a fourth ability and a way to get out of caves. It allows so many dungeons to be cheesed and using it in the Lightning Temple made the experience so much more complicated than it needed to be. Apart from caves, every other place where you needed to use ascend could have been done with Revali's gale (rest in peace) or a bonfire + hylian pine cone, or any of the other devices that came with ultrahand. The uses made for it in the Great Sky Island and in other places felt forced and the developers could have easily come up with another creative way to do this without ascend. I just wish that Ascend and Autobuild were disabled inside temples because it would have made things so much better. The companions also make the temples much more annoying because half the time all you're doing is waiting for Riju or Sidon to stop standing in a random corner and walk up to you. Especially in the Water Temple where your ability was on a time limit, this was especially annoying. The Water and Wind Temples felt like big sky islands and not dungeons. The Snowpeak Ruins in Twilight Princess and the Sandship in Skyward Sword are both excellent examples about how to turn something unconventional into an excellent dungeon, but these temples fail in so many ways. Not only is it so easy to get around the entire dungeon with a paraglider and Tulin that makes it possible to complete the dungeon in under 30 minutes on your first playthrough, the puzzles were so easy and the Wind Temple's boss in particular was so easy to kill despite it looking so fearsome. The Mud Octorok was actually a great boss that I have no complaints about, but the rest of the temple was really awful, with most of the puzzles simply being chalked up to "redirect this floating water bubble somewhere else so you can get to a terminal." The terminal thing returning was also something that was a huge letdown. There was no reason to continue it from Breath of the Wild, especially when the Divine Beast dungeons were such a huge complaint, when they could have added a system of small keys, miniboss, maybe even a new ultrahand ability similar to the ones we got from the sages to replace having a companion with you that you would be able to use across the dungeon. This would have turned the Lightning Temple from a 7/10 dungeon to an easy 9/10 or even 10/10 and would have improved my outlook on the other dungeons a lot more, particularly the fire temple, which was so great aesthetically but the gameplay and puzzles simply were not. While I liked the Lightning Temple and to a lesser extent the Fire Temple and the bossfights were much better, I found myself enjoying the Divine Beasts more than the Wind and Water Temples, and many of the bosses were such pushovers. The dungeons in this game get a 4/10.
I have a number of other smaller complaints. First is that I really wished there were more food and armor options. A return to the "meat skewers" and "fried wild greens" let me down a bit as I was hoping for more variance on food, especially after they added new items like stambulbs and tomatoes that I thought would replace the existing items. I mean, we had a whole sidequest dedicated to discovering Cheese and there's only three recipes for it! (as far as I know) Additionally, I wouldn't have been upset if they gave us the same effects for armor as before, just with a new name and texture. Like maybe they could have slightly updated the look of the Hylian set like they did with the Champion's tunic, or we could have the full Sheikah uniform instead of the Stealth armor, or a Lightning Helmet that actually looked different instead of one that reused the exact same texture as the thunder helm. New monsters such as Horriblins, Aerocudas, and Boss Bokoblins added some great new fights to the game, and I wouldn't have even cared if they reused the same enemies, but the way they attack is the exact same as in Breath of the Wild, which left the combat a little predictable and I was able to kill a Gloom Lynel first try. The only battles that really challenged me were against the Gleeoks, one of the best bosses in all of Zelda history.
My last issue with this game is that I really don't understand what vibe they were going for. Majora's Mask was twisted and disturbing. Twilight Princess was dark and gloomy. Skyward Sword was bright and hopeful. Breath of the Wild was free and really emphasized nature. But with Tears of the Kingdom, they really seem to be doing five things at once and accomplishing none of them. They try to put an emphasis on the creative aspect by adding things like Zonai Tech to the beginning and adding new technologies like the batteries, factories, skyview towers, and other. Then they also try to make this game dark and scary by introducing some horrifying things like chasms, gloom hands, and underground areas. They made the game seem bright and sunny like Skyward Sword in the beginning with the Great Sky Island and the bright yellow color palette. Then they also try to keep the open-world aspect of Breath of the Wild by keeping this massive open world, but with nothing to do inside it since we've already seen most of the stuff in this game's nature areas apart from the new caves. I don't understand what the developers were trying to make this game feel like, and it feels like they tried to do too many things at once and failed to flesh out all of them. I would have loved to see a restored Hyrule that we could explore and I would have also loved to have a nature-filled world like in BOTW with new plants, foods, caves, animals, and areas to explore, but the Hyrule in TOTK seems like a haphazard mixture of both.
There's no incentive to explore this time around with only 3-4 new plants and animals in the overworld and only a few caves that only have Brightbloom seeds, bomb flowers, and bubblefrogs. I love the caves, but they seem a bit same-y over time and I have no intention to find them all. I can't even ride around Hyrule on a horse like in BOTW or in a car like the developers seem to want us to do because I run into those stupid Zonai rocks that are littered around every 5 seconds for no particular reason. All they do is make transportation annoying and I wonder why they went through the effort to put all of the sky island materials on the overworld by these ugly rocks instead of actually having more sky islands like we wanted. The Great Sky Island was undoubtedly the most solid part of Tears of the Kingdom's Hyrule, so why did they deincentivise sky exploration by having most of the sky materials on these fallen rocks?
All in all, Nintendo outdid themselves with the coding in this game, especially putting a massive title like this on the six-year-old Nintendo Switch. However, it was clear that they spent most of their time coding in these new mechanics and the writers clearly phoned in this time around with the worst story and dialogue I have seen in any Zelda game so far. Maybe putting in a completely new game on Breath of the Wild's massive world was too much to ask, but so much of Tears of the Kingdom either directly copies Breath of the Wild (four dungeons in the exact same lands, the exact same food, combat, armor, and people) or takes the same structure and retextures it (four terminals in a dungeon, memories, shrines, a quest to rebuild a village from scratch, "champions" that pass on their abilities to their successors, and those cursed Korok seeds) that I really found no reason to play this game after 100 hours because there was nothing new left to do besides a multitude of side quests that I didn't feel like doing because I had no attachment to this Hyrule like I did in Twilight Princess, Skyward Sword, Link's Awakening, and Breath of the Wild. Maybe I would have liked it more if I was a new player and hadn't played BOTW before, but the amount of content that was unnecessarily copied from the last game into this one really ruined the experience for me. All in all, this Zelda is a C+ for me, a 6.5/10. While it was more fun than the linear and small world of Link's Awakening, it couldn't compare with the story aspect of Twilight Princess and Skyward Sword or the feel of Breath of the Wild.
TLDR: While Nintendo went above and beyond with the new Ultrahand, Fuse, and Recall mechanics, it ultimately wasn't enough for me to save a game that had an extremely lacking story, underwhelming content and dungeons, and a multitude of side quests that was basically repeating everything you had done in 2017. If you're going to argue with me in the comments, please actually read the whole thing first.