so, continuing my thoughts on how horribly implemented, if you can even call it that, the dongos are in totk (low quality ramble bc i ... forgot all the good points i had when i went to write it)
(i do also have some gripes about their design but alas we will ignore that)
(as in, there is a longer running quests leading you on about a mysterious creature sighting only to turn out its like 4 dongos sitting around doing fuck all in the phirone region with their literal only "use" being they shit out gemstones if you feed them glowstone and despite EVERYTHING speaking against it are supposedly native to the tropical climate)
they are very likely only in the game at all to be a reference to the 2019 trailer and were given that 'ability' of shitting out gemstones (ouch??) if fed glowstones to have any use at all, even if that use too is rather infuriating to me (how materials are used rant later in this post), then going on to say they are NATIVE TO TROPICAL BIOMS is really just ..why, would it have been that hard to say you found them in a cave at least? (i suppose you could argue it might make the NPCs look bad then for putting them into the jungle for .. no reason which is very different from caves but you could endlessly speculate about these reasons when the real reason likely is they didnt care) their design and apparent feeding habits do not fit at all into the little part of jungle biom there is, especially given that they just .. materialized out of thin air i guess, you were able to explore the entire phirone region in botw after all and i dont think it expanded in totk but hey things that dont makes sense and dont fit into the world suddendly materializing out of thin air isnt really unique to them in this game .. haha .. :I
even if we were to assume that their diet isnt primarily glowstone and they are grazing animals actually, it still raises the question of how they make all those gemstones out of some grass/glowstones (maybe they are just magical animals that magically generate gems or maybe you are making them shit out their guts, you can make up any reason, i know, not the point of this), why they would suddendly be in the jungle and really .. isnt there pale grass stuff in the underground? (golden opportunity to make them be the reason theres so many big cave systems .. bc they made them by digging for food (with their horns for example)/eating the stone, that would work even outside of my rewrite that combines the underground and caves as bigger unique cave systems that are largely unconnected for maximum creativity in their use and design- and it would explain almost everything about them without having to spill it out directly either; animals exploited by the sonau to dig for stuff and everything .. im not gonna get into how nothing of the sonau and their tech that uses an immense amount of downright copy of glowstones to make thigns that disappear into thin air … doesnt seem very sustainable bc who caresss), and i mean .. they glow in the dark like glowstones do .. which i like alot actually, it makes it more logical that its their main foodsource and uhm .. i dont think there are any glowstones in phirone either? they dont look like they could climb and the jungle is filled with high walls too;
if they are eating the energy that makes the stones glow you could have made them poo white or black sand like those fish that eat corals and leave fine white 'sand' behind, would have been a really striking design for caves and lead you to them or tell you they were there at some point, unique flora that grows on it and all but that isnt as useful to you, le player, at least not as directly useful as gems that are now .. explosive?
(old ass redesign sketch for the dongos)
now, getting into the materials, i dont remember talking about it before but making every single material you collect be fusable or spendable like wood is an awful game design choice that only really seems to serve the purpose of the one moment when you realize you can do that and find it funny to glue a raw piece of meat to an arrow, which loses the fun aspect of it pretty quickly imo, not just bc it looks stupid (rip actualy weapon design) and even not just bc of it making a horrible UI even worse (rip to my poor fingers trying to scroll through that arrow menu that you cant sort properly and also messes up your inventory sorting if you try to), but its just .. uneccessarily excessive, the things that actually have a unique effect i can somewhat see, but even then id rather have a clean inventory with multiple types of arrows than having to fuse every single one each time you want to use it directly from your entire material collection (crafting man .. it would have been so cool),
idk about you but i really do not care to be able to increase the damage an arrow makes by every single number in existence and have a hundred extra fusable material for it (add one new type of arrow that is extra sharp if you reaaaally needed more extra damage that wasnt covered enough by bow and arrow stats); i know it might sound good on paper to have multiple uses for all the material you collect (arrow/weapon fusing, cooking, armor upgrades) but the actual effect is even more grinding and refusal to use more rare materials, the things you fuse to weapons break first (no repairing ..), a weapon without anythign fused to it is practically useless (so you always have to spend something on it), you dont buy arrow types you can only get normal arrows and have to strap your materials to them instead (rip arrow designs), armor still uses material AND a huge amount of money now and you really dont need all of that, having some things be only usable for specific things has its purposes, the only way i could see its uses would be in challenges where you have to work with whatever few things you are given like the master sword trials in botw (and that worked even without that system) but its not applicable to the entire game, it feels like there really wasnt any thought put into it beyond "more option is more good" and given how "more freedom means more good" is one of the big beliefs of them now its one of the only things you could call consistent
(see, having a good amount of weapons to choose from is good, but if you have 1000 of them and half are unusably bad, break without being able to repair, you having to spend your own material on it each time to make it usable, why even .. have that many)
(i liked botws way of using gems in armor etc to explain its effects (like saphires helping against heat) but to have these gems suddendly be highly explosive just annoys me, and its not like it has to be manipulated to become that, you can take a ruby and throw it like a grenade, does that mean every single character that wears gems is walking with bombs strapped to them? how are the gorons still alive at all given i doubt they carefully dust every single gem out of the stone when they dig (and gem trading used to be the big goron thing bc they dont like uhm ..eating it), how can anyone make anything out of them without them exploding? and if its only link who can do that (i .. dont think so? dont enemies also use that stuff??) bc of his special rauru arm .. i hate that and also are you telling me rauru has the midas touch but for explosions instead?? .. he could have just snapped a finger at ganondorf then, all problems solved (as far as rauru is concerned))
coming back to the dongos their usage isnt even very useful, its rather a disgraceful trading maschine for stuff you can find everywhere and once enemies get higher level get even from them :(
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