Its the Portal 2 to BOTW's Portal 1. There is more of it but it feels somewhat bloated, some faults of the first (or aspects that were perceived as faults, anyways) are remedied whilst adding as many issues of its own. The first 10 hours are great and perhaps surpass the original, but then it goes on and on at a more subdued level of quality.

I loved the original Breath Of The Wild. When I played it around 2019 for the first time it felt like a game that was made specifically for me; every major aspect of it being described to me by a friend once and I could only go : "yes! yes!" at everything he said. When I played it it lived entirely to my expectations and even surpassed them. The microdungeons that kept up the pace, the ability to declare yourself ready to face the final boss at any time, the environmental physics systems organically interacting, the willingness to let you approach puzzles in any way : if you could find a way to cheese it you could.

I didn't have any problems with the weapon durability system and I thought it incentivised getting creative with the various systems to efficiently dispatch the various monsters. Nor did I have all that many issues that series veterans had with the weaker plot and lack of big dungeons; in all honesty that was a selling point for me personally. My first Zelda was Ocarina of Time 3D which I never finished as a kid, I dropped the game after the magic lens dungeon because something else caught my eye and when I came back to finish it my card reader had broken and I didnt have enough money at the time to fix it. I also played some of Oracle of Seasons and maybe Link's Awakening? I wasn't really grabbed by either of those. All design decisions are inherently alienating to someone, but I am not blind to the fact that the design decisions of BOTW were welcoming to me but alienating to others.

There is part of me that wonders if I would have loved TOTK more if I hadn't done 3 full runs (all shrines) of BOTW. As much as there are many new systems and locations and quests and all the things you would expect from a new entry, it is at the end of the day the same map. This does have its benefits from returning players in that going back to areas from the first game and seeing them change is always great : Tarrey Town in particular. It does however somewhat dampen my enthusiasm for exploration, paradoxically because there is also a lot more of it to do with the addition of the Sky Islands and the Depths.

If my Steam library is to be believed, I have 900 hours on Garry's Mod from when I played it religiously as a teen and let me just say, the first few hours playing with the various systems of constructing vehicles was akin to getting new toys for christmas, fond memories of thruster boosted bathtubs around GM_Construct. Unfortunately as I seem to have discovered is the case of most of this game, its burns brighter but burns itself out sooner. This might have worked in its favour if it werent for the expectation and obligation of expanding the game overall meant everything felt a bit more exhausting than it ever had in BOTW. Indeed, having the previous map as base, 6 years of dev time and a 70 dollar pricetag did make it obvious that this would be the case but I hope one day we get a sequel that tightens the game as opposed to overextends it.

The first 20 times you do a combat challenge dungeon or find a crazy new enemy in the overworld its new and refreshing, but not by the 50th time. Its the Elden Ring issue, repetition inherently dampens the mystery, the awe of exploration and discovery. This was also somewhat true in BOTW but didnt feel anywhere near on the level of TOTK.

I didnt have a problem with the Great Plateau in BOTW, I didnt think it was overlong at all but I definitely felt that in TOTK. When I finally got to the overworld it made me wonder : "Is there no paraglider in this game? Maybe they want you to really use the new vehicle stuff to overcome the terrain" and I'm not saying that would have made a better game but I am genuinely curious how TOTK would have turned out if your Paraglider was straight up removed (it wouldnt have worked because of the Sky Islands and the wind dungeon but still these could have been changed).

Another element that might have been excised to improve the game imo was autobuild, which I got very early on but almost entirely removed the fun of the game, you make one or two or three general purpose builds and you never have to think about clever vehicles again outside of shrines. They cost resources to make but it just adds a small unwelcome grind to proceedings really.

I quite like the MrHudson sign sidequests. In general I quite like the setting which includes some of my favourite themes : the PostPostApocalypse. The people of this world are dealing with aggressive armies of demons but are nevertheless rebuilding, using the various new zonai tech to their advantage, a kind of industrial revolution.

The theming is cool, I like the Zen motif of the shrines and Rauru. The ancient hylians have a Mesoamerican thing going on in their design but this is mostly just aesthetics and not used for anything particularly interesting that I found.

This game is so dense and there are so many things to discuss that I think I could go on forever : the champions kind of break the challenge of the game, the voice acting and story continue to be kinda bad, the dungeons are a bit more elaborate and better but thats honestly a negative to me personally, horses are even more useless now, I was annoyed at the final ganondorf fight despite not dying to him at all the combat controls have always been kind of shit and the joycons are terrible so asking me to do two perfect dodges to even touch this Kikuchiyo looking mfer tested my patience; I got a bit annoyed at that fight (more than I have in a while and I did a soul level 1 run of DS1 on that very switch).

At the end of the day the best decision BOTW did was to make fighting Ganon at any point possible. That is still technically the case in TOTK but after I was "done" with the game and finished the 4 main quest and wanted the game to end before I started to dislike it, the game threw me a whole ass sequence of quests that dragged on and started to drain my goodwill and the boss annoying me was the icing on the cake.

A lot of games don't know when to finish. A lot of games in fact do not finish at all like arcade games and the like. New Game+s, HighScores, etc these are all elements to marry two concepts : 1) Unlike other media, Videogames are a lot of the times not dropped by players at "the end" of the game especially in earlier times, rather when the player is "done". Not to say these two necessarily always clash but its definitely something that must be kept in mind when designing a game that isnt a relatively short or cinematic linear game. 2) Games need endings to bring closure and structure to its narrative and mechanical difficulty curve.

The Structure of BOTW was genius in this respect because a 100% obsessive and someone who just wanted to play for 10 hours could both enjoy the game and declare it done so long as they could defeat Ganon. Again, this is still somewhat the case in TOTK but the game doesnt really tell you. The number 1 reason I'll dislike a game is that I will be "done" with it when it has started to outstay its welcome and it simply will NOT end. If a game can speed along to its conclusion when I have reached this point it will look at a great review, if it does not, well, I am liable to either hate it or even drop it (I have never beaten Aria of Sorrow for this very reason, I reached my "done" point near the end and when Soma turns into dracula and youre asked to do some bullshit I just didnt care enough to conclude it). I'll admit I am generally a rather impatient person, but if you've read this far you're probably aware of the fact that this is just my personal perspective at the end of the day.

Tears of The Kingdom is a great game buried in a shell of bloat that didnt quite stick the landing despite still being a good game that I enjoyed for longer than most these days.