Here’s a list of top 100 things I hate about Tears of the Kingdom. Number 100 is those puddles of gloom hands that appear out of nowhere and grab at me when I’m just trying to mind my own business. Seriously, get your dirty little fingers off of me. Number 99 is the fact that I have to sleep and eat and work instead of just playing Tears of the Kingdom all of the time. And then numbers 98 all the way through number one is every time I’m forced to scroll through a menu trying to find a specific thing. Whether I’m in the pause menu or the quick access menus, trying to find something I’m looking for is guaranteed to be a bad time.
I know Tears of the Kingdom makes some improvements to Breath of the Wild’s menu interface, but it’s still far from perfect. Making food and elixirs shouldn't be this much of a headache, but I find myself avoiding the chore until I’m completely out of resources or wasting the last few meals I have to gain effects that I don’t even need just to stay alive. Crafting is such a fundamental component of TOTK’s gameplay, I just can’t believe more thought wasn’t given to making that process simpler so that players don’t have to spend so much time rooting around in menus when all they want to do is get back to the adventure.
It’s a mix of needless complexity, lack of information, and poor navigation that compound each other. When you walk up to a cooking pot, you should be able to interact with it to open your menu and select the group of ingredients you want to throw in. Instead, you have to stand near it - but not too close, or you won't be able to hold the items - then open your inventory manually, select and item, select hold, then select the rest of the items you want to hold, then leave the menu, then aim at the cooking pot and press A to throw everything in. It’s madness. Neither Monster Hunter nor Read Dead Redemption, the two series with the most cumbersome controls of all time, would ever make you go through all of that to cook fish.
Searchability is an even bigger issue for me. There’s 110 items currently just in my materials pouch, and I can never find anything I’m looking for. The best sorting option when you’re trying to cook is to sort by type, but you’re still going to have to manually sort through a big long list of materials to find what you need, and that’s assuming you know what you’re looking for. The materials don’t get the same icons that food do, so finding the ingredients you need for slip resistance, temperature control, gloom damage recovery, speed, stealth, or any other status effect is a matter of reading the text on every item until you find the one you need. They couldn’t give each ingredient the relevant icon, or at least put the relevant text in bold? I’ve got 110 different ingredients here, you can’t expect me to remember what they all do.
The poor navigation, particularly when using the quick menu, has a big impact on how I play the game. When I open the material menu I’m either going to sort by most used or by Fuse attack power. I’m really good at sticking monster parts to my arrows and swords because the strongest part is always going to be the first thing on the list, but I know I’m missing out on the elemental effects and other utility that other, weaker monster parts can offer. I’m rewarded by simply making the highest damage weapons because it saves me time in the menus. Similarly, sorting by most used ensures that I’m always using the same items and the same strategies. TOTK is all about experimentation and creativity, but the limitations of the menu leads me to always use the simplest and easiest strategies.
I wish there were other ways to sort the menu that would help me find things more easily and experiment more. I hate scrolling through the horizontal quick access menu, and I don’t want to pause the game to look through my inventory either. Every cumbersome menu I’m forced to interact with is time away from actually playing the game, and a threat to the immersion that the developers have so painstakingly created in Tears of the Kingdom. I want to explore the world, not explore a list of vegetables and entrails.