As someone who liked The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild quite a lot, but didn't see it as the masterpiece that everyone else did, I went into The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom with somewhat positive expectations, as the only thing I really asked of it was for the gripes that I had with the first game to be remedied. At first, I partially didn't want to pick this game up too soon before playing through some other Zelda games first (which is kind of why I powered through Ocarina of Time over the past week or so), but once the FOMO kicked in, I finally went out of my way to buy the game around five weeks ago and have been playing it since then. Even if I wasn't on board the massive hype train that had been chugging across the internet for six years, Tears of the Kingdom still managed to have me feeling let down and burned out by the time my 55-ish hour playthrough was over, and while it's definitely a good game, a lot of that didn't feel like it came from the new ideas that Nintendo brought to the table this time around. Despite the game's sleek presentation, six year wait, and $70 price tag, Tears of the Kingdom felt less like an actual sequel to Breath of the Wild and more like a standalone expansion or DLC, as it simply adds stuff on top of the previous game rather than truly refining or revamping the formula. Rather than fixing the same-y shrines, level scaling, repetitive Korok challenges, forgettable sidequests with pitiful rewards, flat-out bad voice acting, or even the Z-targeting which they somehow haven't figured out how to switch targets for since 1998, Nintendo decided to add a new set of powers and two new areas, and all three of these managed to feel flawed in their own ways.
The main selling point of Tears of the Kingdom seems to be the Ultrahand with how it lets you build vehicles and structures using Zonai devices, but I got sick of it very quickly. In Breath of the Wild, the physics engine wasn't really that much of an issue, but since this new game draws so much attention to it with its emphasis on building stuff, I ended up having to spend minutes at a time just attaching and reattaching parts and devices at the right angle due to how finicky the whole system was just for the build to not even work when I turned it on. The implementation of Autobuild felt like their way of fixing this by having you instantly reconstruct builds that you've already made, but this just felt like Nintendo solving a problem that they created in the first place rather than just avoiding it entirely. When I wasn't rebuilding the same flying devices or combat devices, I'd often just glide or climb my way to get to where I wanted to go just so that I wouldn't have to deal with the hassle that came with trying to play with Nintendo's new box of LEGOs, and even then, the ability itself wasn't substantial enough to the point where it made me go "Wow, these guys really broke new ground". The other three powers were decent enough additions, but they all just sort of felt shallow and one-note, as Fuse was less about experimenting with different weapon and material combinations and more about just picking the material that did the most damage, Ascend only really let you phase through the smooth, flat surfaces that the developers wanted you to phase through, and Recall just became a case of either "throw the projectile back at the enemy" or "grab the material that Tulin blew off of a cliff because you were trying to pick it up and both of these actions are mapped to the same button".
Along with the middling new selection of powers, Tears of the Kingdom decided to add a whole two new area types, and neither of them felt all that compelling. A lot of the game's marketing tried to make the new Sky area seem like a big part of the game, but its implementation is comically insignificant. Although the initial tutorial area in the sky is huge, all of the game's other sky islands are incredibly small, and the slightly bigger ones house little more than Zonai dispensers, shrines that make you bring a crystal to a specified location over and over again, and a copypasted miniboss made of blocks. Even if the sky felt lackluster, it doesn't compare to just how lame the Depths were to me, as all you do there is mine more Zoanite for your builds and light up lightroots so that you can light up more lightroots. Even if you try to explore the Depths to find items like new armor pieces, each of the Depths' sections is literally walled off, so you have to constantly go in and out of the Depths through different craters just to keep exploring an already dull area. Going into this game, I was expecting it to feel similar, but I was genuinely surprised to see how little of the main overworld changed when compared to the first game. Granted, the main towns and the areas where you meet the sages have been affected by the in-game Upheaval, but other than that, the world of Tears of the Kingdom looks and feels exactly the same with its world layout, regions, and backwards sense of progression, and the sense that I was just playing more Breath of the Wild was what made get really fatigued with this game really quickly. Even the supposedly new temples felt pretty much the same as the Divine Beasts from the previous game, although they came packaged in with laughably easy boss fights, puzzles that could be beaten in a good two seconds, and the literal exact same cutscene after each temple that feels duller and duller each time it comes up.
To me, one of the elements that made Breath of the Wild feel so refreshing was how little the game tried to steer you in the supposed "right" direction, but I felt that Tears of the Kingdom sort of fumbled this by placing a greater emphasis on its story. Instead of opening the world to you right from the get go like the previous game, Tears of the Kingdom makes you sit through a lengthy, handholding opening sequence and a lengthy, handholding tutorial, and even quite a few of the shrines that you find in the world were straight up tutorials for the game's mechanics and physics rather than actual challenges. The actual story is decent enough, but a lot of it got held back by the choice to include a lot of it through the collectible Dragon Tear cutscenes. Not only did the cutscenes themselves largely consist of stiff characters spouting exposition, but the narrative of the main quests doesn't totally mesh with that of the Dragon Tears, as the game acts as if you're unaware of the reveals and details that it already showed you. I understand that this review is largely negative, but I want to clarify that I did enjoy my time with Tears of the Kingdom. The core gameplay from Breath of the Wild is already fun on its own, and my Switch battery went from fully charged to 0% practically every time I picked the game up, but since those ideas felt a lot fresher back in that first game than it does now, simply repeating it while including a few new additions wasn't enough to make me go head over heels for this game. Tears of the Kingdom is definitely a solid game, but it's also one of the most disappointing games I've played in a long time, and even with its flaws that I consider to be glaring, it will still manage to win Game of the Year because people seem to eat this sort of thing up.
The main selling point of Tears of the Kingdom seems to be the Ultrahand with how it lets you build vehicles and structures using Zonai devices, but I got sick of it very quickly. In Breath of the Wild, the physics engine wasn't really that much of an issue, but since this new game draws so much attention to it with its emphasis on building stuff, I ended up having to spend minutes at a time just attaching and reattaching parts and devices at the right angle due to how finicky the whole system was just for the build to not even work when I turned it on. The implementation of Autobuild felt like their way of fixing this by having you instantly reconstruct builds that you've already made, but this just felt like Nintendo solving a problem that they created in the first place rather than just avoiding it entirely. When I wasn't rebuilding the same flying devices or combat devices, I'd often just glide or climb my way to get to where I wanted to go just so that I wouldn't have to deal with the hassle that came with trying to play with Nintendo's new box of LEGOs, and even then, the ability itself wasn't substantial enough to the point where it made me go "Wow, these guys really broke new ground". The other three powers were decent enough additions, but they all just sort of felt shallow and one-note, as Fuse was less about experimenting with different weapon and material combinations and more about just picking the material that did the most damage, Ascend only really let you phase through the smooth, flat surfaces that the developers wanted you to phase through, and Recall just became a case of either "throw the projectile back at the enemy" or "grab the material that Tulin blew off of a cliff because you were trying to pick it up and both of these actions are mapped to the same button".
Along with the middling new selection of powers, Tears of the Kingdom decided to add a whole two new area types, and neither of them felt all that compelling. A lot of the game's marketing tried to make the new Sky area seem like a big part of the game, but its implementation is comically insignificant. Although the initial tutorial area in the sky is huge, all of the game's other sky islands are incredibly small, and the slightly bigger ones house little more than Zonai dispensers, shrines that make you bring a crystal to a specified location over and over again, and a copypasted miniboss made of blocks. Even if the sky felt lackluster, it doesn't compare to just how lame the Depths were to me, as all you do there is mine more Zoanite for your builds and light up lightroots so that you can light up more lightroots. Even if you try to explore the Depths to find items like new armor pieces, each of the Depths' sections is literally walled off, so you have to constantly go in and out of the Depths through different craters just to keep exploring an already dull area. Going into this game, I was expecting it to feel similar, but I was genuinely surprised to see how little of the main overworld changed when compared to the first game. Granted, the main towns and the areas where you meet the sages have been affected by the in-game Upheaval, but other than that, the world of Tears of the Kingdom looks and feels exactly the same with its world layout, regions, and backwards sense of progression, and the sense that I was just playing more Breath of the Wild was what made get really fatigued with this game really quickly. Even the supposedly new temples felt pretty much the same as the Divine Beasts from the previous game, although they came packaged in with laughably easy boss fights, puzzles that could be beaten in a good two seconds, and the literal exact same cutscene after each temple that feels duller and duller each time it comes up.
To me, one of the elements that made Breath of the Wild feel so refreshing was how little the game tried to steer you in the supposed "right" direction, but I felt that Tears of the Kingdom sort of fumbled this by placing a greater emphasis on its story. Instead of opening the world to you right from the get go like the previous game, Tears of the Kingdom makes you sit through a lengthy, handholding opening sequence and a lengthy, handholding tutorial, and even quite a few of the shrines that you find in the world were straight up tutorials for the game's mechanics and physics rather than actual challenges. The actual story is decent enough, but a lot of it got held back by the choice to include a lot of it through the collectible Dragon Tear cutscenes. Not only did the cutscenes themselves largely consist of stiff characters spouting exposition, but the narrative of the main quests doesn't totally mesh with that of the Dragon Tears, as the game acts as if you're unaware of the reveals and details that it already showed you. I understand that this review is largely negative, but I want to clarify that I did enjoy my time with Tears of the Kingdom. The core gameplay from Breath of the Wild is already fun on its own, and my Switch battery went from fully charged to 0% practically every time I picked the game up, but since those ideas felt a lot fresher back in that first game than it does now, simply repeating it while including a few new additions wasn't enough to make me go head over heels for this game. Tears of the Kingdom is definitely a solid game, but it's also one of the most disappointing games I've played in a long time, and even with its flaws that I consider to be glaring, it will still manage to win Game of the Year because people seem to eat this sort of thing up.