Behold, a new contender for "my most poorly-constructed review"! Perhaps it's a commentary on how this game pulls your attention in all directions. Maybe it's a play on words, joking about Link's primary new ability in this game being about constructing things. Either way, this game is huge, and my thoughts have gotta come out somehow.

Nintendo of America has a real problem with hiring non-British voice actors, and then having them do really bad British accents anyways. The voice direction in this game is not very good at all, which definitely takes me out of the story at points. Not only that, but Breath of the Wild's "memories" system is still used to dole out a majority of the story, and this is a system that really doesn't benefit TotK. There's a definitive, chronological order that TotK's memories are meant to be viewed in, and if you're exploring the map to an unhealthy degree before doing any main quests, you might be like me and get some plot bombshells casually dropped on you before you witness the proper reveal of that information, which lessens the impact. It also just makes the story feel really disjointed in general. I can't say I was invested in it until a very late-game exposition dump, and while that did grab me real strong, I wish I had that sense of importance much earlier. What strikes me as odd is that the events of BotW are almost never mentioned in this game. Shiekah technology is all but gone, and characters from the previous title are rarely brought up in passing. It may be less noticeable if not for the fact that this game is The Sequel To "The Legend Of Zelda: Breath Of The Wild". It also didn't help that Eiji Aonuma stated in interviews that "the sequel to BotW will be darker in tone, akin to going from OoT to MM." That set my expectations WAY too high.

The dungeons are still formatted like they're 5 shrine puzzles stapled together, but the design variation between them gives each one a more unique identity than the Divine Beasts. Some dungeons are better than others, but they all serve a purpose that was somewhat lacking in BotW: a buildup to a climactic finale for each area's story arc. They all end with unique bosses that give you a chance to use each sage's abilities before they get permanently added to your entourage. Having the sages' abilities on hand at any time in the field sounds useful, but in practice, they really just serve to be a ton of visual noise. To use their abilities, you gotta run up to them and press A, which is easier said than done in the heat of combat, as their AI causes them to actively run away from you, or get in the way of other sages. All they had to do was map their powers to button combos. Instead, I eventually made the active choice to only keep 1-2 of them out on the field at once.

This game has an ungodly amount of stuff to see and do, somehow more than BotW. I see a well, imma go down it. I see a cave, imma go in it. I see an unvisited island in the sky, imma fly to it. I see an unfinished shrine, imma drop everything else to finish it. The world is significantly more populated with NPCs than BotW as well. There's a new request around every corner, or maybe just some info on points of interest. Some of these are checklist tasks, which is a design choice that gradually diminishes my will to interact with them. Sorry signpost guy, but I'm not stopping to help you if it only rewards me with 20 rupees and a few food items each time. I ignored most "I need to reach my friend" Koroks simply because I didn't want to grind my exploration to a halt and attempt to make the physics work in my favor. I guess that puts me firmly in the camp of supporting Korok-and-ball torture.

Nintendo made a point to put a major focus on the sky islands for most of their promotional material, and I couldn't begin to tell you why. The sky is quite barren, and most of its optional islands are puny and copy-pasted around various regions of the map. The only full-sized island is the one that serves as the game's tutorial, oddly enough. The Big N should feel lucky that skydiving onto floating islands is a sensation that never gets old. The real action supposedly takes place in the depths, which is a location that I find to be tedious by design. The terrain necessitates vehicle usage, and the darkness means that you'll be constantly tossing lightbloom seeds just to see anything. There's still a lot to discover (rare equipment, coliseums, dungeon boss rematches), but it often feels more dull exploring down under due to the stagnant aesthetic. What made me feel the most fatigue was using the map. I sincerely wish there was a way to toggle certain icons on or off on the map, but in other cases, I wish the map was marked even more. Here's a tip from me to you: Outside of the Great Sky Island, keep your sensor set to treasure chests while exploring the sky. Nearly every single chest up there contains something of significant value.

Shrines are still good in this game, but the puzzles admittedly feel like they have rigid, intended solutions in mind. Usually you'll just have to create the contraption that's requested of you, with the very few puzzle pieces the game gives you. A puzzle with only a few pieces isn't necessarily difficult, as there's only so many ways you can arrange the pieces. Now, the other type of shrines are the "proving grounds", and when I see Link enter a shrine naked and afraid, I know I'm in for a good time. Stripped down to pretty much nothing but the bare essentials, the game's survival aspects shine the brightest in these trials, setting up scenarios where on-the-fly thinking is a necessity if you wanna emerge victorious.

Enemy variety still kinda sucks. it's more than BotW, but when you're exploring a map of this size for this long, these are the kind of things you begin to take note of. The new overworld bosses are fun though. Durability is much less of a problem, even if the solution is frequently "fuse a monster horn onto your weapon of choice". My problem comes with the fact that enemies are killing me in 2-3 hits when I have 30 of 40 heart containers. Part of that may be caused by how none of my equipment was upgraded, but that leads into the fact that I didn't unlock a single Great Fairy until over 100 hours into my playthrough), due to having significantly more involved unlock conditions compared to BotW. Combat's not really different at all, but the menu you select items from in the field REALLY sucks. You accumulate so many materials, scrolling through a horizontal list one-by-one is a chore that only gets worse as you get more stuff. Fusing items to your arrows in order to give them properties like fire and electricity is cool, and so are arrows being more of a universal commodity to modify. Not sure who on the dev team thought it would be a good idea to make you fuse a material to your arrow every single time you wanted to fire one. At that point, I would've liked them to keep the different arrow types, just let us fuse our own stockpiles to use at our leisure.

Link's new abilities in this game are provided through his arm, courtesy of Rauru. Ultrahand is basically a version of magnesis that can be used on damn near everything, along with the ability to glue any object to another object. Mix together the new Zonai technology, and you can build a contraption for any situation. The keyword is "can", because I truthfully only built when it was really necessary for progression. You can make some absolutely batshit insane contraptions in this game if you want to; I've seen this game described as a modern-day playable Looney Tune, which really isn't that far from the truth when I see what other people are doing. I also see people earning their engineering degree by playing this game (seriously, look at this shit). Your other abilities are a lot less versatile. I've already mentioned fuse, but that's just something you'll be doing passively all the time. Recall is extremely situational, but it's still useful in those niche situations (I used it to retrieve machines that ran off without me). Ascend might be the most amusingly simple-yet-effective ability of them all. You just...go up through whatever ceiling is above you. It works as an "escape rope" from caves, a way to bypass using tons of stamina climbing walls, and occasionally lets you solve some pretty clever puzzles.

So, a $70 game, huh? Listen, I can tell there was a fuckton of work put into making this game, and they would want to recoup development costs, but for a Zelda game? A sequel to one of the most critically acclaimed games of all time? It was gonna sell a triforzillion copies no matter what, and they knew it. Glad they brought back their "game voucher" program for this title, I got this and another game for $50, mostly because I wanted to keep my pride intact. An 8/10 might seem harsh to overly-defensive Zelda fans, but that's just how I feel. Now, if the game had a way to clean up gloom like using FLUDD in Super Mario Sunshine, we'd have an instant 10/10 on our hands, no matter what the rest of the game consisted of. I just wanna wash it all away, because clean is better than dirty, and dirty's meaner than clean. Let me hose down Ganondilf, damn it.