ok now im curious whats your tears of the kingdom take
Oh you triggered my trap card. I don't think I could ever give an exhaustive list of all the faults I find in totk, but here are the main ones for me:
without the fresh feeling of exploration, totk feels like any other open world, meaning it's just a series of little chores you complete for the sake of completing them, with a shockingly low amount of new and exciting reward. There was some of that feeling in botw, but it was compensated by the fact that you didn't know the map and just exploring was rewarding enough. Botw felt like an adventure, totk felt like a video game.
Even the new places to explore are samey and mostly empty (caves, Sky, Depths) so it started to feel like busywork pretty fast.
The building mechanic is a technical marvel, but too clunky/slow/punishing for me to interact with it outside of puzzles. Which leads me to dungeons. The dungeons were too easy and short, despite me being a good little player and not cheesing any of them. I'd trade less shrines for bigger, mechanically-themed dungeons any day.
my honest take is that I waited 6 years for that game and through the different trailers, I constructed a radically different image of what the lore would be. That's fine, that's on me, but it colored my perception, and it doesn't change the fact that nowadays, I find the story inferior to botw's.
The decision to ditch the ancient sheikahs and basically replace them with ANOTHER ancient civilization that's even less explained is beyond me. We don't even get a clear timeline of when and where the zonai lived, just another nebulous "even before the ancient sheikah" and "basically everywhere". When we have. Literally. TWO talking ghosts of these people who could tell us stuff!!!!!! But noooo let's make one entirely mute and the other disappear at the end of the tutorial only to deus ex machina him back in during the ending.
When I played totk, I made the mistake of thinking that it was like botw, that following the main quest was more of a suggestion and that I could explore at my own leisure. I also made the mistake of immediately wanting to see all the story geoglyphs and ended up getting the master sword before I even started my second main dungeon or talked to the Great Deku tree. This means that for the rest of the GAME, I have learned exactly ZERO new major information. By the time I finally got Mineru, i immediately got told to kill Ganondorf and I realised that the dragon tears quest was literally all there was in terms of story. I had accidentally ruined the story progression for myself. Which, imo, is the devs' fault. It could have easily been prevented if the glyphs were locked behind dungeon completion for example, or not making them so damn easy to spot from so far.
The ending fight? Genuinely incredible (in isolation). The ending? Abysmal. They opted for the coward's deus ex machina that doesn't explain anything and didn't even give an opportunity for the player's action to matter even a little. The best ending where Zelda + Link are healed should have been only unlockable if you've done the work of healing your fucking arm in all the shrines and recovering all of Zelda's memories. But no, they needed EVERYONE to see the money shot of Link grabbing Zelda's hand no matter what. SO instead our secret ending is the cheesy ass cinematic where Mineru says goodbye (but doesn't even name Purah as her heir??) and all these characters that I struggle to care about fumble a speech for peace. Yay.
And last but not least: WHERE. THE FUCK. IS KASS!!!!!!!!!
