this is a half-baked thought but something that caught my attention as I was playing Tears of the Kingdom the other day is that TOTK feels less...embodied than Breath of the Wild? like sure, ruins raining down from the sky? floating ruins? that stuff is cool. but BOTW's shrines have a deeper relationship with the land they occupy. some of them have sat out in the open for a hundred years, being a part of the landscape, but a ton of them are buried in the ground. you can feel the ground rumbling as they emerge. they are very physically part of Hyrule even when people don't know that they're there. and at the end of every shrine, it's not a statue that greets you: it's a full on corpse. a person who remained in that shrine in a state of suspended animation, it seems, solely to provide the hero with a reward that will make him stronger. it was equally as planned as the Zonai shrines, set up to deal with a future evil/calamity, but especially with the overall empty and abandoned feeling of BOTW it feels like the last organized stand of sheikah monks against an overwhelming force of destruction. meanwhile the Zonai shrines feel almost happy go lucky by comparison. the story of what happened in the past feels like it has stakes, but that energy doesn't carry through as much as it could past the initial "Zelda is trapped!!" scenes.
but on the other hand I really do like the dual plot with Zelda and Link and the themes of community and the way side characters are more engaged and present in TOTK. I just don't know yet what to make of how the shrines feel kind of lackluster to me as the central mechanic in TOTK. I guess part of it is that constructs are cool and dangerous but way less fear-inspiring than guardians. incidentally guardians also have literal contact with the ground, which maybe makes them feel more sturdy. they also feel less sapient than constructs, which in some ways make them scarier - they feel programmed just to keep attacking you, so you better have a plan or you're screwed. maybe I'm also biased by already knowing the map itself pretty well from BOTW so there's less discovery involved, even with the TOTK changes. and on a meta level I understand why TOTK is so different from BOTW and I'm not faulting the devs for making a different game in itself. but it's also frustrating being like, there were zero hints in BOTW about Zonai tech/early Hyrule despite all that stuff coming into being right away in TOTK. or if there were any I can't think of them. surely SOMETHING would have been hanging around in a place where Link might notice it.
I'm actually hoping that by starting to analyze this stuff I'll gain a new appreciation for TOTK. I don't think I'll ever like it as much as BOTW. but I want to give it a fairer chance by thinking about it.