You're talking about each of the first three sections? I'd have to see what's different about the others
This is a typical cinematic Nintendo uses to introduce a puzzle. I'm struggling to see what exactly the issue is here.
And to the extent it is an issue, people are unlikely to perceive it as a Midna problem. Midna's dialogue is incorporated into a cinematic in order to convey information. It's done all the time in these games.
Gameplay lasts for exactly a second here.
With good reason. TP's dungeons are very complex compared to others in the series. This dungeon is built around a missing statue. It's something that's easy to miss on account of being absent.
I don't have any issue with these. Emphasizing these little guys' importance is the right decision.
And, just like the gate example above, even if people had issue with these why would they blame Midna? Midna is simply one part of the technique Nintendo used to make sure players knew what the overall goal of the dungeon was.
The problem I have with your list is that it doesn't make any effort to analyze exactly what's happening. Your bits of context are nothing but vague descriptions, which renders the list misleading at best.
You've taken the effort to analyze four sections which is what you should be doing. But I think it's pretty clear you're still not interpreting what's happening correctly.
The question is, why, in the face of the mountain of statistics you've compiled, do people persist in declaring Fi is more annoying than Midna?
Why do you think that is?
Her interruption is essentially the same for every segment. She stops you when you are almost to the twilight and tells you that if you go in it will be a one way trip. You have to talk to her again once you reach the twilight and confirm that you want to enter, so might as well put the message there instead of making you stop twice.
The cinematic is entirely unnecessary and Midna is controlling it. You don't need her to point out the gate or the dig spot. She already tutorialized the crap out of that stuff in the last area. If you're going to discount stuff like this, you do realize that most of Fi's interactions are accompanied by cutscenes and other NPCs talking, right? All of the area intros are like Midna's. Every time Fi talks about the Kikwis is while you are talking to the Kikwis.
It doesn't matter that gameplay only lasts a second. Midna is wasting your time telling you that having a horse will make travel faster. Just cuz she isn't 75% certain doesn't mean it doesn't count. It'd be better if she popped up immediately, but Midna likes to wait for you to take 1 step sometimes.
It seems like you want a list of when each helper pops up completely by themselves. You don't think it counts if they pop up during or after a cutscene. It's getting late and I need to get up early for work. Fi has fewer things so I can do hers from memory, but Midna would require a review of the walkthrough to see which ones meet your stringent criteria.
Skyloft/Faron Woods
- Fi recommends getting a shield and some potions before heading out. She also tells you you can now get rid of the ugly HUD.
- When you are over Faron Woods Fi shows you how to use the sky map and tells you you can reach the surface via the pillar.
- When you knock down the vine leading to the next area, Fi appears and tells you can equip items you already have selected by tapping B, and that if you experience problems aiming you should press down on the d-pad to recalibrate. This is probably the most important thing she says in the whole game.
- Fi tells you the dungeon will be dangerous and reminds you you can return to the sky if you need supplies.
Skyloft/Eldin Volcano
0
Earth Temple
- When you encounter your first lizalfos Fi appears and tells you that you can talk to her while z-targeting enemies to learn info about them.
- When you reach the boss chamber Fi notices chains on the ground and suggests that Zelda was chained up here but escaped.
Skyloft/Lanayru Desert
- Upon stepping on a safe path hidden below the quicksand, Fi pops up to tell you you can place beacons on submerged walkways in the quicksand by checking your map and upgrades your beacons so you can place more.
Lanayru Mining Facillity
- Fi points out the boss door, which depending on when you encounter it it may be obscured by barbed wire.
8
Why? Well there are certainly legitimate reasons to prefer one over the other. I certainly think Midna is a better character. I think that the reasons are harder to put into words and things like "tutorials" "handholding" etc are easy answers that don't really pan out with the facts.
Like the tadtones?
SS is full of pace killing points, let's not act like TP is worse when that pretty much the biggest issue of SS that's worse than pretty much everything Nintendo ever published (yes it's worse than DK64 collecthatons).
The game ask you to retread all big areas with the special swordless areas when you're done with them. And that's BEFORE the game gets tedious when you have to suffer the tadtones and the other endgame BS.
Not even the stone stuffs at the end of TP was as bad as that.
As far as progression goes the twilight is really functionally the same as the single areas of SS.
The 1rst area is really just the forest, the 2nd is the mountain+village+eastside of the field and the 3rd part is really zora domain+hyruletown+lake hylia+connecting field.
The warp points of SS are pretty useless, you have to get to a stone to get back to the sky to then go the area you want to then warp again.
TP? You basically open a menu to warp where you want.
Might as well argue that XenoWii have a less convenient warp system than Metroid Prime 3 (instant menu warp Vs get to drop point, choose one of the select few area you can after a menu of sort warp).
No, the tadtones aren't like that at all. That quest happens entirely in Faron Woods. The closest example Skyward Sword has is when you go to Eldin Volcano the second time and find out you have to travel to Faron to get the water basin and then return.
What? TP has the worst pacing in the series. Both games make you revisit the same areas, but the way TP does it is far worse.
The twilight segments in TP are horrible. The areas are far too simple for that kind of thing and collecting the tears is no challenge. Then after doing them you immediately are asked to traverse the same area again. The land itself doesn't really challenge you and exists mostly just to connect destinations.
In SS you explore areas rich with traversal challenges. You go through the areas once and then reach the dungeon. Rather than just moving through the areas as passages between destinations the areas themselves provide challenges to overcome. Then in the second act of the game you return to the areas you've already conquered and are tasked with completing Silent Realm challenges to unlock the path to new areas. The Silent Realm challenges involve collecting light tears like the Twilight segments in TP, but that's where the similarities end. The Silent Realm challenges are actually challenging. You have no weapons and every time you collect a tear a timer starts. If you don't collect a tear before the timer ends a bunch of one-hit-kill enemies will chase you. They are very fun and really test your abilities.
The save statues are rather conveniently located. They are all over the place. And part of exploring each area is that you open shortcuts. You should never be far from a statue. The way SS handles warps actually helps build world cohesion, as you're not actually warping. Technically there is no warp system in SS. You're just skydiving. You can choose different drop zones after securing save statues, but obviously you have to be over the area in order to skydive into it. It's less convenient than TP's, sure, but the Sky is quicker to cross than Hyrule Field and there are very few instances where the game even asks you to travel between two surface areas.
The final visits to the 3 sections aren't ideal, but I still find them preferable to the crap TP made you do. They aren't all that time consuming and unlike anything in TP are challenging. The swimming controls were fine and collecting the tadtones was a decent challenge. The only disappointment I really had with that section was how the flooded forest looked. Eldin volcano had a short stealth mission to reclaim your gear. Lanayru had a completely new section where you had to fight monsters while following a timeshift stone in a minecart, which was fun. All in all all of that probably took about as long as it takes to do the stuff you need to do to get to the City in the Sky but with the bonus of challenging you.
Come on Ragnarok, you know how convoluted it is to make use of them. You have to go back up to the sky, fly back into whichever zone you want (including the one you had to exit, you can't even warp to different points within the zone you are currently in). With Midna its 4 clicks away, and you can go to any point.
The person I was quoting said that you have to go through the puzzle stuff repeatedly, not the sky. SS has warp points in all of the most convenient locations of each area.
Also don't forget that you can only warp in TP as wolf Link. You can't really warp at your leisure until after you get the master sword. Once you clear the twilight of an area you have to hoof it. And every time you have to ask Midna to turn you into a wolf and ask her to warp you. At least they are improving that in the HD version.
My intention is not to change your mind. However, if i see some inconsistency i will point it out.
But the way it was presented wasn't conductive to reach any meaningful conclusion taught.
As an hypothetical (not saying you are wrong with the assertions on your list) let's say a given character intrudes 30 times and other 10 through out the game. If the NPC that does 10 interventions do so for meaningless exposition in comparison to the other, then the lesser number doesn't matter.
Also what's important here is "the players time". For example, the lenght of those 10 interventions could be larger than the total lenght of the 30.
The way your comparison could work for reaching a conclusion, is to have access to all the dialog that takes away control of the player for each character. From there evaluate the quality of the information and how much of the player's time it wastes. But that's just too much work. XD
i find little value in deciding who is leading the race for the most annoying Zelda companion title. Only reason i mentioned other characters besides Fi, was because it was brought up previously.
In this segment of your post lie the inconsistencies.
#1. The excuse doesn't hold here. It was pointed out in the post you are responding to, but it bares repeating:
There's a cinematic fly through clearly pointing out the positioning of the door at the top. Fi's intervention here? Redundant.
#2. No, it's not optional. Yes, if i don't read the stone tablet Fi won't talk. But if i read it, like most players will do in their first playthorugh, then there's a 100% probabilty that Fi will point out the obvious. XD
#3. Again, the excuse doesn't hold here since a cinematic pointing out the exact location of the chest is triggered the instant the player enters the area. Fi is been redundant again.
Well, on average Both Fi and Midna's lines tend to be about 2 text boxes long. While it is true that Midna's text moves faster, Fi's loads at a rate comparable to fast reading speeds. They could make it load faster but you wouldn't be able to read it faster anyway. The majority of Fi's stuff doesn't seem to take longer to read than the majority of Midna's. Midna has some non-optional tutorials thrown in for good measure.
I mention Midna's interaction in the Temple of Time because you found it exceptional that Fi was pulling a similar act all the way in the 4th dungeon of SS to something Midna does in the 5th dungeon of TP. For comparison's sake:
[Link]... Don't you think there's something odd about that statue? In the grove and in the temple entry, there were always matching ones on each side, but there's only one here... Why don't you use your senses to take a look around?
::turn into a wolf and use senses::
I knew it... There was one more here originally. We need to find the other statue in this temple that matches that one.
The Ancient Cistern has a really unconventional door that I doubt most players would see. It's parallel to the ground and you go through it vertically via a staircase. It seems fair for Fi to point out that there is a door there.
I think the point of Fi talking is to make sure players know what they were supposed to have seen in the flyby. The chest is kinda small in the shot. It's really important that players notice it because it's necessary to figuring out how the dungeon works. The blurb about 85% is meant as a joke since we're 4 dungeons in and Fi should be certain what's in the chest.
Whether there was or not isn't the issue.
I never had to do anything like that robot escort mission in TP. I would rather stab my eyes with a rusty fork and bathe my head in lemon jif before ever playing through that turgid shit ever again. Same goes for the tadtones.
Absolute fucking bollocks that was.
Really? The robot escort mission is just like the Telma escort mission in TP. TP also had the Hidden Village western shoot em up. I enjoyed escorting Scrapper because the bow controls in SS are really fun to use and sadly the bow doesn't get used much in SS.
Our discussion got me curious, so i started searching for the scripts of the Zelda games. Not surprisingly there are various sources online.
It paints a clear picture of how much tutorializing and sheepherding the games have integrated into themsleves throughout the years. For example here's the one for Skyward:
http://www.gamefaqs.com/wii/960633-the-legend-of-zelda-skyward-sword/faqs/71336
i did some superficial reading of Fi's lines for the Faron Woods Kikwi search. And effectively, it's the constant "reiteration" the aspect that's more apparent of the NPC dialogue.
For example, we are all familiar with the use description when acquiring an item for the first time. Well, in this area with both the Slingshot and the Beetle, Fi proceeds to repeat the item's use just right after the traditional text description. Here's the one for the Beetle:
Item description:
"You got the Beetle! The unexplained power contained within this insect-shaped item allows you to control it as it flies through the air!
Point the Wii Remote at the screen and press A to launch into the air!
If the controls feel out of alignment, press V while pointing the Wii Remote at the center of the screen."
Then Fi makes her apperance.
Fi: You have acquired a new item. Analysis of this object's insect-like profile
and wings indicates it can fly.
Tilt the Wii Remote to remotely pilot the device. The sharp structure on the
front of the device can sever threads and deliver a blow to smaller objects.
To launch the device, press B to ready it for takeoff then press A.
I think Fi telling you the beetle controls is fair. It's the most complex item to use in the game.
Keep in mind that some of those blurbs are optional. Fi does not repeat the slingshot's use when you get it automatically. The Kikwi Elder tells you how to use it since the item description does not.
https://youtu.be/gKHaq1FmXTA?t=20m27s
I'm pretty sure the only item she pops out for when you get it is the beetle, and in your example she doesn't just repeat what was said before but instead gives you the full controls. The item description just says to point it and press A. Fi elaborates that you need to steer it by tilting and you have to hold B to aim it.
Twilight Princess has some weirdness with the first dungeon item, too:
https://youtu.be/8-VNJSnxYqU?t=17m34s
First the Gale Boomerang itself talks to you. Then you get the standard item and control description.
Then Midna pops up to say you should keep exploring the dungeon.
Then to exit the room you have to hit the windmill switch 3 times for some reason. This is something they should fix in the HD version. Why 3 times?
